GitLab: Integration w/o owner user

[Tobias Rahloff]

Hi Compass community, 

Based on the documentation, it is required to give Compass highly elevated permissions:

• do not set expiration date, leave it empty
• 🛑 set required scopes for the token to “api” and “write_repository”
• 🛑 select an owner role for the token
• have GitLab owner permissions for the group you want to connect

Why is this needed for, essentially, an IDP with DevEx/DORA Metrics BI Dashboard? Unfortunately, this requirement is currently halting the adoption of Compass. Similar tools like LinearB are fine with read-only access. 

The only capability I could think of where write access would be needed is to add the `compass automatically.yml` file to repositories. 

If this is the reason for owner + repo_write permissions, I think it could be a completely viable to just not use this feature. 

[Josh Campbell]

Creating merge requests (to add compass.yaml) and future plans to add the Templates feature to GitLab are the primary drivers for needing write permissions. Revisiting the permissions and seeing if we can ask for less and progressively get more (if needed/as Compass features are used) is something we can explore. 

Did you try using an incoming webhook by chance?