title: “Gerrit 2.15 Release” permalink: 2.15.html hide_sidebar: true hide_navtoggle: true toc: true

Download: 2.15.3 | 2.15.2 | 2.15.1 | 2.15

Documentation: 2.15.3 | 2.15.2 | 2.15.1 | 2.15

Release Highlights

  • New change workflows for changes not yet ready for full review (formerly Drafts).

  • The new PolyGerrit UI is mature enough for most uses.

  • Account data is stored in NoteDb.

  • NoteDb for change metadata is considered stable, and new sites use it by default.

  • NoteDb migration for change metadata is available.

  • Made several improvements and additions to the documentation to help users find the information they need.

Important Notes

Schema Changes

This release contains schema changes. To upgrade:

  java -jar gerrit.war init -d site_path

Support for draft changes removed

Support for draft changes and draft patch sets has been completely removed.

In most cases, the new Work-In-Progress workflow is a suitable replacement. Note that in the Draft workflow, an individual patch set can be a Draft. However, in both the new Work-In-Progress and Private workflows, WIP and Private apply to the whole change, not an individual patch set.

When upgrading from an earlier version, draft changes are migrated. This applies to all draft changes, or changes with draft patch sets (even if the highest patch set is not a draft), as follows:

  1. The “Draft” flag is removed from all patch sets.
  2. If the change has been merged or abandoned, no further action is taken.
  3. Otherwise, the change is moved to one of
    • Work-In-Progress change (this is the default)
    • Private change

The upgrade process prompts (once) for what Drafts should be migrated to; either WIP (default) or Private.

The migration means that some draft patch sets, which were previously hidden, might now be visible to some users who could not previously view them.

Change owners can make them private again using the “Mark Private” option in the UI, or using the REST API.

Votes no longer changed retroactively due to permissions

Historically, Gerrit would retroactively change votes on a label when permissions for the voting user changed. For example, if a user voted Code-Review+2, but then later lost permission to vote +2 (for example, was removed from a Maintainers group), all CR+2 votes by that user on open changes would suddenly appear as CR+1. In 2.15, this retroactive behavior no longer applies: the CR+2 votes remain CR+2, even if permissions were changed.

This new behavior makes label permissions more consistent with other permissions: usually, permission changes don‘t apply retroactively (you can’t un-submit a change), and the permission is only checked at the time an action is performed. It also fixes some technical issues and improves performance of reindexing changes.

Release Signatures

Starting in the 2.14.x bugfix series, all release JARs and documentations are signed by the Gerrit maintainers. This policy will continue for all future releases.

New URL Scheme

By default, all Gerrit URLs generated and used by the UI include not just the change number but the project name as well.

  • https://gerrit.mycompany.com/1234 becomes https://gerrit.mycompany.com/c/some/project/+/1234
  • https://gerrit.mycompany.com/#/c/1234 becomes https://gerrit.mycompany.com/#/c/some/project/+/1234
  • https://gerrit.mycompany.com/changes/1234 becomes https://gerrit.mycompany.com/some%2Fproject~1234

In addition to providing more context to humans reading the URL, this new scheme improves performance under NoteDb, and paves the way for load balancing a multi-master installation with repository affinity.

Old URLs will continue to be supported, and simply redirect to the new URLs.

NoteDb for Accounts

Almost all account data is now stored in NoteDb. The account data is migrated automatically during the upgrade process by running gerrit.war init.

The only account data not stored in NoteDb proper are the groups (remain in ReviewDb) and the reviewed flags which were moved to an external database (AccountPatchReviewDb) since 2.13.

For Gerrit slaves the branches that contain the account data must be replicated.

NoteDb for Changes

With this release, the new Gerrit storage backend, NoteDb, is officially supported for storing change metadata and is the default storage backend for new installations.

For existing sites, migration to the new backend may be done either offline or online in a running server.

Support for ReviewDb will be removed in Gerrit 3.0. Gerrit 3.0 will only support offline migration; to run an online migration, you must use the 2.15.x series.

Daemon User Setup

The setup documentation now recommends setting up a user named gerrit instead of gerrit2. This username can be anything; the choice of name doesn't affect any functionality. However, some example commands in the documentation may refer to the new gerrit user, so admins might need to tweak them to refer to gerrit2 instead.

Strict validation on labels

In 2.15, posting a review including a vote on any labels that does not exist or is outside of the permitted range based on the ACLs will now always result in a failure of the entire operation. Previously, if the “strict labels” option was set to disabled in the review input, votes to any invalid labels would be silently ignored. This option has now been removed from the REST API's ReviewInput as well as the SSH review command.

CI systems that rely on the non-strict behaviour of earlier Gerrit versions may require additional configuration to avoid casting votes to labels which are invalid for the change.

Following feedback on the 2.15 release a new configuration option change.strictLabels was introduced in 2.15.2 to allow the new strict functionality to be optionally enabled. By default it is disabled to maintain backwards compatibility with previous release.

New Features

PolyGerrit UI

  • Implement admin interface (projects, groups and plugins).

  • Refreshed UI based on material design.

  • Add hashtag support.

  • Add support to show uploader on change screen.

  • Lots of bug fixes.

New Workflows

Draft, Private, Work-In-Progress

The draft change feature has been removed, and replaced with two separate features:

Ignore Changes, Mark Reviewed

Changes can be ignored, or marked as reviewed, to reduce email notifications and keep dashboards cleaner.

Explicitly Record Reverted Changes

When a change is reverted via the “Revert” button, this fact is recorded in the change metadata of the newly-created revert change, not just in the commit message as in the past. A new search operator revertof: allows for searching for reverts of a given change.

Delete Inline Comments

Individual inline comments can be deleted after the fact by site administrators.

CCs Users By Email

Users may be CCed on changes by entering their email address, even if they have not registered an account on the Gerrit server.

This feature is only available when using NoteDb.

Publish Comments on Push

When pushing new patch sets on a change or a series of changes, users can configure Gerrit to automatically publish any pending draft comments they have on those changes, avoiding the need to click through the web UI to publish all comments.

Mark Changes Due to Rebase

When diffing two patch sets of the same change that have different parents, some differences between the patch sets may be due to the rebase, instead of changes between the patch set and its base. These differences are now highlighted in the UI (PolyGerrit only), and are not counted towards the size of diffs.

Improved Push Error Messages

When a push fails because the user does not have the required permission, the generic message (prohibited by Gerrit) has been replaced with a detailed message describing the exact permissions required.

Documentation updates

With this release, we have updated several sections of the documentation to make it easier for users to find the information they need. These updates include:

We have also made changes to improve navigation throughout the documentation.

REST API

Projects

  • ProjectInfo now contains label configuration information.

Changes

Groups

Config

API

  • New Java API for accessing plugins.

  • New Java API for accessing custom project dashboards.

  • New getGroups method in account API to get a user's group memberships.

  • New ChangeReportFormatter extension point for customizing the report output from git push.

  • Instances of IdString used to return true when equals was given a String instance equal to the IdString's URL-encoded value. This violates symmetry, so this behavior was removed: IdStrings now never compare equal to Strings.

Replication plugin

  • It is now possible to replicate directly to another Gerrit instance.

    Is is possible to enable replication to different Gerrit instance by using gerrit+ssh:// as the protocol name followed by the hostname of another Gerrit server.

Hooks plugin

  • Username parameters are added to hook invocations.

    When an account parameter is passed to a hook, it gets formatted as Name (Email) or just Name when the account does not have an email address. If the account‘s name is not set, the name is “Anonymous Coward”. From this information it is not easy for a hook to get the account’s username.

    All hooks that take an account parameter now automatically also get a corresponding username parameter. For example if the hooks takes the parameter --change-owner Name (Email) it will automatically also get the parameter --change-owner-username username

Dependency Updates

  • Update Apache Commons Codec to 1.10

  • Update Apache Commons Compress to 1.13

  • Update Apache Commons Validator to 1.6

  • Update Apache Mina SSHD to 1.6.0

  • Update AutoValue to 1.4.1

  • Update Blame Cache to 0.2-5

  • Update Bouncy Castle to 1.57

  • Update Dropwizard to 3.2.4

  • Update Gitiles Blame to 0.2-4

  • Update GWT to 2.8.1

  • Update Jetty to 9.3.18.v20170406

  • Update JGit to 4.9.0.201710071750-r

  • Update Joda-Time to 2.9.9

  • Update juniversalchardet to 2.0.0

  • Update Lucene to 5.5.4

  • Update Pegdown to 1.6.0

  • Update Polymer to 1.11.0

  • Update Soy to 2017-04-23

2.15.3

  • Issue 8915: Fix file handle leak when running GC. Upgrade JGit to 4.9.2.201712150930-r.15-g5fe8e31d4 which includes a fix to prevent the file handle leak.
  • Issue 8866: Add project and account settings to create new changes as WIP by default.
  • Issue 6094 and Issue 9112: Add support for Elasticsearch versions 5 and 6. Support is added for Elasticsearch versions 5.6 (tested with versions 5.6.9 and 5.6.10), 6.2 (tested with version 6.2.4) and 6.3.1. Version 2.4 is still supported (tested with version 2.4.6). Instead of using the ‘Jest’ client to communicate with Elasticsearch, the Elasticsearch low level API is now used. Support for Elasticsearch is still considered experimental, and is not recommended for production use.
  • Issue 9372: Simplify the configuration of Elasticsearch servers. Instead of specifying each server in a separate [elasticsearch "name"] section, with separate values protocol, hostname, and port, the servers are now configured as a list of server values in the [elasticsearch] section. This also fixes Issue 9383 where a “default” server http://localhost:9200 would be added by the site initialization even if other servers were already explicitly configured. During startup the list of configured Elasticsearch servers is logged at info level.
  • Issue 9146 and Issue 9147: Fix Elasticsearch queries for results with substrings in keywords. Doing a query that involved the characters “.” and “_” from full text fields did not include results with keywords as a substring. This behavior was different from Lucene, where these two characters are mapped to the space character (" ") so that the query returns keywords separated by them.
  • Allow to omit the elasticsearch.username setting. If elasticsearch.password is specified, the username can be omitted and it will default to elastic which is the default username configured when running Elasticsearch with security enabled.
  • Allow to assign “Delete Own Changes” permission to “Change Owners”. It was only possible for a user to delete their own change if they were a member of a group that was assigned the “Delete Own Changes” permission. This was counter-intiuitive as it was necessary to either create a specific group, or assign the permission to “Registered Users”. It is now possible to assign this permission to the “Change Owners” virtual group.
  • Issue 9354: Add “Delete Changes” permission. It was only possible for a user to delete another user's change if they were a member of a group that was assigned the “Administrate Server” permission. A new “Delete Changes” permission is added. This permission can be assigned to a group, or to the “Project Owners” virtual group.
  • Issue 9345: Fix creation of plugin log file when log4j.configuration is set When the environment variable log4j.configuration is set, log files defined by plugins were not created because the appender couldn't be found.
  • Fix repeated Change-Id in error message when Change-Id line is not in the footer.
  • Issue 9245: Return the correct information in JSON response after moving a change. When moving a change by the REST API, the JSON response contained the branch name of the original destination rather than the new destination.
  • Fix internal error when moving a change to a branch that does not have a label. If a change had a score on a label that was only configured on the original branch, moving to a destination branch that did not have the label caused an internal error.
  • Fix internal error when moving a change without specifying the destination. Omitting the destination branch in the input caused an internal error.
  • Fix internal error when deleting a comment without providing input. The input is optional on the Delete Comment REST endpoint, but calling it without input resulted in an internal error.
  • Fix internal error when rebuilding Note DB and a change is missing from Review DB.
  • Fix omission of ‘branch’ values when saving project config. The ‘branch’ values were omitted when saving the config, resulting in them being lost.
  • Issue 9195: Strip comment lines out of commit message when creating change. When a change was created from the UI (or via the ‘Create Change’ REST API), and the commit message consisted of only a subject beginning with a hash character (#), the change was created with a zero Change-Id. This was because lines beginning with # are considered to be comments, and are stripped from the commit message by JGit before computing the Change-Id for the commit. Before attempting to create the change, Gerrit now strips out any comment lines from the commit message and returns an error if this results in the commit message being empty.
  • Issue 9389: Fix support for syntax highlighting of Clojure source files in the Polygerrit UI.
  • Issue 5316: Fix incorrect relative URL paths in Gitiles links in the Polygerrit UI.
  • Fix internal server error when generating email sender name for non-existing account.
  • Add --generate-http-password option to the ssh set-account command. To bring the ssh command more in-line with the REST API for a user, it is now possible to generate a new HTTP password. This allows ordinary users to generate a new HTTP password via ssh when they cannot log in to the web UI (e.g. due to being a service account). Access to the set-account command is also relaxed; normal users may use it to set a new password on their own account.
  • Sanitize values of user.name and user.email from gerrit.config. The user.name and user.email settings were being read as-is, which would allow them to be configured with values that may interfere with standard email name/address parsing.
  • Fix the default text in the ‘Password’ field on the ‘HTTP Password’ screen in the GWT UI. The default text said “(click ‘generate’ to revoke an old password)” but the label of the button is actually “Generate Password”.
  • Add reporting of work queue related metrics. Metrics are reported for core work queues. For work queues created by plugins, metrics are not reported.

2.15.2

  • Issue 8861: Fix generation of change numbers to prevent duplicates. When migration to NoteDb was aborted, and then started again later, generated change numbers overlapped with change numbers created in ReviewDb in the meantime.
  • Issue 8931: Pass the project name to ‘change indexed’ event listeners. When NoteDb is enabled, the change information is stored in the project's git repository. Without the project name, plugins were not able to retrieve the change information.
  • Issue 8742: Fix infinite loop in intraline diff loader. A regression introduced in 2.15.1 caused excessive CPU usage when loading intraline diffs.
  • Issue 8697: Restore the ability to ignore invalid review labels. In 2.15 the strict_labels attribute was removed from the review input entity, and Gerrit no longer silently ignores invalid label scores. This caused breakage in CI systems that submit reviews post-merge and don't have different configurations for if the change is already merged or not. For example the Gerrit Trigger Plugin was broken, as discussed on the Gerrit mailing list. A new configuration change.strictLabels is introduced. When enabled, Gerrit will reject invalid labels, otherwise will silently ignore them. By default it is disabled, for backwards compatibility with previous releases.
  • Issue 8728: Allow percent encoding in patch set titles.
  • Issue 8850: Fix reviewerin: search results when user is added as CC. The reviewerin: search should only return users that were added as a reviewer, but was also including users that were added as CC.
  • Issue 8817: Fix internal server error when listing projects and a repository is not available. The new permission backend was throwing an error when a repository could not be found. Now it is simply omitted from the project list.
  • Issue 8643: Properly display the status of “Work in Progress” changes. When a change was submittable (i.e. had all the necessary labels) but was still in the “Work in Progress” state, its status was displayed as “Merge Conflict” in the change list and the change screen in the GWT UI.
  • Issue 8936: Add missing ‘Hashtags’ label on the change screen in the GWT UI.
  • Issue 8916: Allow ownerin predicate to be evaluated by the index.
  • Fix double creation of SSH command execution queues.
  • Fix timestamp for submodule updates. When a submodule was updated by subscription, the same commit timestamp was always used due to the server identity being cached.
  • Allow to include username in servlet response header. By setting http.addUserAsResponseHeader, the servlet response includes a ‘User’ header that contains the name of the logged in user, enabling reverse proxies to log the name of the user that issued the http request.
  • Fix user permission checks in APIs when invoked via the GerritApi. Actions were incorrectly being denied because the user validation was comparing user object instances rather than the account ID that they represented.
  • Allow to replace the default H2 persistent cache with a custom implementation. The default H2 persistent cache can be replaced by a module that implements the CacheImpl interface. An implementation is provided for postgresql.
  • Various logging improvements.
  • Hooks plugin
    • Issue 9015: Add a submit hook The submit hook is invoked synchronously when a change is submitted. If it returns a non-zero exit status, a MergeValidationException is thrown and the submit is prevented. This adds back the ability to block submit by a hook which was removed in version 2.14 due to the reworking of the ref-update hook behavior.
    • Fix repeated instantiation of the ref-update and commit-received hooks. The hooks were not singletons, which caused new instances to be created on every invocation.
    • Wrap account ID in quotes when passing as hook argument.
    • Improve logging to make it easier to track down hook execution problems. When a hook exits with an error status (i.e. non-zero), or times out, an error is now emitted to the log. Previously there was no log on timeout, and the exit status was only logged at debug level. The configured hooks path and resolved path for hook files is logged at info level. When a hook file does not exist, a message is logged at debug level.
    • Improve documentation
      • Expand and improve documentation related to debugging hooks.
      • Restructure the hooks page to separate synchronous and asynchronous hooks, and add a table of contents.
  • Polygerrit fixes:
    • Issue 8655: Clear suggestions on autocomplete input change.
    • Issue 8237: Link account chips to owner search rather than user dashboard.
    • Issue 8375: Add reset button to my menu in settings.
    • Issue 7815: Don't curse over files with up/down keys.
    • Issue 8722: Limit assignee suggestion to users that can see the change. This was fixed for the GWT UI in 2.15.1.
    • Issue 8940: Fix loading change edit on change screen.
    • Issue 4552: Allow some sections of the change list to overflow
    • Add a link to group page in groups section of settings.
    • Make sure plugins are not double counted.
  • Elasticsearch fixes
    • Issue 8523: Fix configuration of elasticsearch during site initialization. When the site was initialized with Elasticsearch as the secondary index, the elasticsearch.prefix was not set, and Elasticsearch server-specific settings were not correctly set under elasticsearch.name.protocol, etc.
    • Issue 8527: Improve documentation of index.maxLimit for Elasticsearch. When using Elasticsearch, index.maxLimit should not exceed the value of index.max_result_window configured on the Elasticsearch server.
    • Issue 8553: Fix reindexing of an already initialized site with Elasticsearch.
    • Issue 8690: Allow to use the index start and index activate ssh commands with Elasticsearch.
    • Issue 8525: Fix setting of changed lines in the change info.
    • Issue 8588: Fix setting the star icon status in the change info.
    • Issue 8806: Fix online reindex to new index version.
    • Change default Elasticsearch prefix to gerrit_.

2.15.1

  • Issue 8677: Fix internal error when sending raw input to PUT and POST REST endpoints. In particular, this caused errors when using the plugin manager to update or install plugins.
  • Issue 5181: Limit assignee suggestion to users that can see the change.
  • Issue 6112: Add support for “Included In” in the polygerrit change screen.
  • Issue 6583: Fix false negatives for edits due to rebase.
  • Issue 8574: Fix refesh of polygerrit change list with “Shift + R”.
  • Issue 8703: Fix false warning in server log when creating a new project.
  • Issue 8252: Improve error message in polygerrit when adding a group member to a group that does not exist or is not viewable for the current user.
  • Allow admins to toggle the WIP flag on all changes.
  • Fix internal server error when group UUID cannot be resolved when getting audit log.
  • Display group UUID in group audit log if group name is missing. The group name can be missing if there is no group backend that handles the group. This can happen for example if a plugin that handled the group was removed.
  • Fix removal of email/password on external ID update.
  • Replication plugin:
    • Fix creation of missing repository. When replicating to a destination where the repository does not exist, updating the HEAD reference failed because the passed reference name was not absolute.
    • Add documentation of how to exclude repositories from replication.
    • Fix logging of new project creation and project deletion. The “created” and “deleted” logs were emitted even when the operation failed.
  • Allow graceful rolling restarts Set a graceful stop timeout for allowing Jetty to wait for incoming requests to be completed before shutting down its sockets.