GitBull is a web interface that connects to GitLab’s API and integrates with other platforms used by TU Delft for user administration. It streamlines project generation and management for courses, as well as importing groups and their members. It facilitates permission control for course editions. It also generates personal and group contribution statistics and sends notifications for slow progress.

There is an increasing number of students at TU Delft, and each of these may encounter courses with group assignments. The university uses GitLab to organize those, but setting up each project is both time-consuming and inconvenient. Management-wise, many projects and repositories have to be created. Then, student accounts are created if needed and assigned to their respective project teams. A Python script was previously used to automate this process, but it was outdated and prone to errors. It also required modifications depending on the course’s specific requirements. Monitoring-wise, course staff had access to scripts that generate reports on individual contributions to a Git repository. That being said, those scripts were outdated both visually and functionally, using metrics that provided a biased overview of the student’s progress.

Because GitBull is an open-source project, one can go to the GitBull repository, choose Issues in the menu and open a new issue. There are templates for submitting features and bugs and it should be straightforward from there.

There are two main ways of contributing: working on an open-standing issue or tackling a bug bounty and earn something extra. GitBull contains an issues list and a filter for all the bug bounties. For reading the rules of contributing check the CONTRIBUTING.md.