No "accept merge request" button with developer level access

Question

I'm not seeing an "Accept Merge Request" button in gitlab despite having "Developer" level access. Instead there is this message:

Ready to be merged automatically

Ask someone with write access to this repository to merge this request.

According to the documentation, users with "Developer" access have the ability to "manage merge requests", but this doesn't seem possible in this case. I have two "Developer" level users that are seeing this problem, one of which pushed the project to the gitlab instance to begin with. I assume he must have write access?

Version information below

GitLab 7.14.3
GitLab Shell 2.6.5
GitLab API v3
Ruby 2.1.6p336
Rails 4.1.11 

Please let me know if any more info is required.

Answer 1

Developers can accept merge requests. However, it depends on how the project is configured, too.

Developers can accept merge requests when:

1. The merge target is not a protected branch.
2. The merge target is a protected branch, if an owner/maintainer has checked the 'Developers can push' checkbox on the protected branch setting.

If a developer is seeing the message you describe it is probably because of a protected branch and the 'Developers can push' box is unchecked.