Gerrit Code Review - Email Notifications

Description

Gerrit can automatically notify users by email when new changes are uploaded for review, after comments have been posted on a change, or after the change has been submitted to a branch.

User Level Settings

Individual users can configure email subscriptions by editing watched projects through Settings > Watched Projects with the web UI.

Specific projects may be watched, or the special project All-Projects can be watched to watch all projects that are visible to the user.

Change search expressions can be used to filter change notifications to specific subsets, for example branch:master to only see changes proposed for the master branch. If a filter would match at the All-Projects level as well as a specific project, the more specific project’s notification settings are used.

Notification mails for new changes and new patch sets are not sent to the change owner.

Notification mails for comments added on changes are not sent to the user who added the comment unless the user has enabled the 'CC Me On Comments I Write' option in the user preferences.

Project Level Settings

Project owners and site administrators can configure project level notifications, enabling Gerrit Code Review to automatically send emails to team mailing lists, or groups of users. Project settings are stored inside of the refs/meta/config branch of each Git repository, and are placed inside of the project.config file.

To edit the project level notify settings, ensure the project owner has Push permission already granted for the refs/meta/config branch. Consult access controls for details on how access permissions work.

Initialize a temporary Git repository to edit the configuration:

  mkdir cfg_dir
  cd cfg_dir
  git init

Download the existing configuration from Gerrit:

  git fetch ssh://localhost:29418/project refs/meta/config
  git checkout FETCH_HEAD

Enable notifications to an email address by adding to project.config, this can be done using the git config command:

  git config -f project.config --add notify.team.email team-address@example.com
  git config -f project.config --add notify.team.email paranoid-manager@example.com

Examining the project.config file with any text editor should show a new notify section describing the email addresses to deliver to:

  [notify "team"]
  	email = team-address@example.com
  	email = paranoid-manager@example.com

Each notify section within a single project.config file must have a unique name. The section name itself does not matter and may later appear in the web UI. Naming a section after the email address or group it delivers to is typical. Multiple sections can be specified if different filters are needed.

Commit the configuration change, and push it back:

  git commit -a -m "Notify team-address@example.com of changes"
  git push ssh://localhost:29418/project HEAD:refs/meta/config

notify.<name>.email

List of email addresses to send matching notifications to. Each email address should be placed on its own line.

Internal groups within Gerrit Code Review can also be named using group NAME syntax. If this format is used the group’s UUID must also appear in the corresponding groups file. Gerrit will expand the group membership and BCC all current users.

notify.<name>.type

Types of notifications to send. If not specified, all notifications are sent.

new_changes: Only newly created changes.
new_patchsets: Only newly created patch sets.
all_comments: Only comments on existing changes.
submitted_changes: Only changes that have been submitted.
abandoned_changes: Only changes that have been abandoned.
all: All notifications.

Like email, this variable may be a list of options.

notify.<name>.header

Email header used to list the destination. If not set BCC is used. Only one value may be specified. To use different headers for each address list them in different notify blocks.

to: The standard To field is used; addresses are visible to all.
cc: The standard CC field is used; addresses are visible to all.
bcc: SMTP RCPT TO is used to hide the address.

notify.<name>.filter

Change search expression to match changes that should be sent to the emails named in this section. Within a Git-style configuration file double quotes around complex operator values may need to be escaped, e.g. filter = branch:\"^(maint|stable)-.*\".

When sending email to a bare email address in a notify block, Gerrit Code Review ignores read access controls and assumes the administrator has set the filtering options correctly. Project owners can implement security filtering by adding the visibleto:groupname predicate to the filter expression, for example:

  [notify "Developers"]
  	email = team-address@example.com
  	filter = visibleto:Developers

When sending email to an internal group, the internal group’s read access is automatically checked by Gerrit and therefore does not need to use the visibleto: operator in the filter.

Part of Gerrit Code Review