Can I recover a GitLab merge request for a deleted branch?

Question

While doing some branch maintenance today, I lost a MR and the associated discussion. Not a tragedy but I'd like to get it back if possible. I found an open GitLab enhancement request to undo branch delete but that doesn't quite seem to be what I want. Here's what happened:

Branch A was pushed to our local installation of GitLab, an MR created, and some discussion ensued. We realized that A was a good start but we needed some significant refactoring. We hoped to keep the branch name for the work we'd ultimately merge/ship so we:

• Created A-prime on the local system and pushed it to GitLab
• Deleted A, hoping that the MR would be associated with the commits, not the branch. But when we deleted A, the MR was no longer accessible.
• Recreated A at the same commit as it had been and pushed it to GitLab hoping the MR was hanging out and would get reassociated.

Clearly our mental model of GitLab is wrong. It seems that a post-commit hook or something deletes MRs as a branch is deleted. My question now is: can I get the deleted MR and its discussion back?

Answer 1

I apologize for wasting the communities time. I'm a GitLab newbie and was stumbling around. I didn't stumble far enough. Today we discovered that you can get to the original MR if you have the URL. When you get there, it's Closed, as you'd expect, I suppose. If you go back to the project level and navigate to MRs, then pick the Closed tab, it's there. It likely was there all along but in our panic and newbiness, we didn't find it.