GitLab

What a member can do

• Search projects, code, issues and merge requests.
• Create and update issues, epics and other work items, and comment on them.
• Create, review, approve and merge merge requests.
• Read pipelines and job logs, and create, retry or cancel a pipeline.
• Read repository files, create branches and add commits.

Each task names the GitLab tools it may call. gitlab on a task means every tool the GitLab server offers; a name such as gitlab.<tool> means that tool alone. A tool the task does not name is refused, whatever the connection allows.

Who connects it

A GitLab connection acts as the GitLab account that signed in when it was connected. It can do what that account can do, and no more.

Anyone who may change tools in your enterprise can connect GitLab for a member or a team. Connecting it for the whole enterprise is for the owner, and the people the owner allows.

A connection can sit on the enterprise, a team, a member, a role or a task, and the one further down replaces the one above: task, then role, then member, then team, then enterprise. A connection on anything but a task also reaches the chat of every member it covers.

What waits for you

In a run, nothing on GitLab waits for you unless the task declares a gate on it. To approve each change before it happens, gate the tools that change something on the task. See Gates and tool scopes.

In a chat, a GitLab tool that its server does not mark as read-only asks you before it runs, unless you chose Always allow for that member and tool.

Setup

Before you connect

This address serves GitLab.com only. An Owner of the top-level group must allow MCP server access: it can be off for groups created before GitLab 19.5. Vulnerability tools need the Ultimate tier.

Connect it

GitLab is an Express tool, so there is no server address, key or app to set up. Work in one browser window throughout: the sign-in returns to the portal in the window you started from.

1. In the portal, open the member's page → Tools. To connect it for a team or the whole enterprise, open Tools in the sidebar.
2. Under Express, find GitLab and choose Connect. On the Tools page you are asked who uses it: one member, a team or the whole enterprise.
3. GitLab's sign-in opens. Sign in with the account the member should work as, and approve what it asks for.
4. You are back on Tools, and GitLab shows as connected.
5. Name the tools on the task, gitlab for all of them or each by name.
6. Check it. Run a task that reads something from GitLab. The run page shows the call and what came back.

You can take the access back at any time: delete the connection on Tools, or remove Zero Human OS from the connected apps in your GitLab account.

A first task to try

With GitLab connected, give a member a task that uses it. For example:

Each morning, list the merge requests waiting more than two days for review and comment on each to nudge its reviewers.

Start this task in the portal. It opens a conversation with your COO with the request written out. Read it, change what you like and send it. The COO asks what it still needs to know, then proposes the task for you to approve: its name, who owns it, its guardrails, the GitLab tools it may use and its instructions. Nothing is created until you approve it.