GitLab Incubation Engineering - Latest, 21 Feb 2023

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: Incubation Engineering - Service Desk - Update 4

Description

This is the forth update video for the GitLab Service Desk Single Engineer Group. With GitLab 15.9 there will be a first smaller release of a feature of this SEG. If you access a service desk issue without at least the Reporter role for the project, you won't be able to see the email addresses of the issue author and all email participants. We also improved our documentation for our internal Service Desk development. And the next bigger chunk in delivering customizable email addresses for Service Desk is now in review: Custom email address verification.

Update-Issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/incubation-engineering/service-desk/meta/-/issues/9
Custom email address verification Merge Request: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/111303

You can find all resources on the Service Desk SEG handbook page :
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/service-desk/

Please subscribe to this GitLab issue if you would like to receive notifications for all future updates:
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/incubation-engineering/service-desk/meta/-/issues/3

Additionally you may have a look at the feature exploration issue:
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/incubation-engineering/service-desk/meta/-/issues/2

If you want to learn more about Incubation Engineering at GitLab, please visit
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/

Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:14 Obfuscate issue email participants
0:46 How to set up Service Desk in GDK
1:15 Custom email address verification

A

Hi, my name is Mark I'm, the single engineer group for gitlab service desk, and this is update number four.

A

I think I have good news. The first smaller feature that I worked on will be released in 15.9, which should be in a couple of days and it's the obfuscated issue, email participants based on memorol I, mentioned in the Showcase and the previous update.

A

um This has been merged a couple of weeks ago now, and it will also be featured in the release post as a second release post item, so you may read about it in the release blog post. Additionally, we added some updates to our guide in the gitlab development kit, docs on how to set up mayroom and service desk in GDK, which is this one here and I also recorded a video version of that um with some further explanation.

A

um So you can kind of take this video and go through all the steps with me and that's the bigger chunk I worked on that for for a few weeks now, it's the verification, part for service desk custom email addresses, and it's it's quite a big one, and it's finally done it's in review. It's this much request. It has a lot of um screenshots of emails that will be sent out with different error messages and a couple of code, changes and I. Think I can give you a short overview of what's happening there.

A

um The basic ideas you set up your custom email address properly and you set up a forwarder to your service desk email address of your gitlab instance and then configure those SMTP credentials for your custom email address in Gaylord and once you've done that you can trigger the verification process that will send a special verification, email with a verification token that has 12 characters via those specified, as in the pre-credentials and to a special email address with a sub addressing part.

A

In this case, it's support plus verify at example.com when the custom email address is supported. Example.Com, we will also notify all project owners and the triggers or the person who triggered the process um that a verification process has started and we'll try to actually send this.

A

So that might fail because you provided invalid credentials or we cannot reach the host or we have SSL issues. I mean this kind of stuff, and if that happens, we directly abort the process and again notify the project owners and the triggerer that it did not um work out if it worked and we could send the email, this email will be forwarded to the service desk email.

A

In that case, the service does emails contact at example.com and you will have a service desk address for a project like contact test project, and then there is the project ID and issue at example.com. The email will then land in your mailbox of the service desk email and the gitlab instance will receive that email and collect it and Trigger the second part of the verification process.

A

It will check whether we received this email within a 30 minutes time frame whether it has the correct from headers, because sometimes redirection headers are strange and we cannot ensure that it's the correct from header and we also check whether it's the correct verification token, if anything, goes wrong again, we notify the project owners and the trigger via email that it did not work. If everything worked, fine, we Mark the custom email address as verified and notify everyone that you can now enable the custom email address.

A

So that's the basic idea behind it and the flow additionally I can show you some screenshots of the emails.

A

This, for instance, is a verification email which contains just some copy and the verification token- and here you also see that it goes to the plus verify sub addressing part, and then you have this email, which is the notification email that goes out to our project owners and the triggerer so really know that there is a project and there is a verification process happening and then, let's assume it worked, you will receive this email as project owner or trigger and then for the various error. Cases like you provided invalid credentials.

A

This email or the token, is not correct or something like this, and this is kind of it. For today, the next one will be a monthly showcase at the end of February I'm. Really looking forward to this um and see you soon.