Creating connections

The idea of connections in {gitlabr} is to generate functions with the same signature and capability of the central API call function gitlab(), but with certain parameters set to fixed values (“curried”). This way these more specialized functions represent and provide the connection – for example – to a specific GitLab instance as a specific user. Such specialized functions can be created by the function gitlab_connection() and then used exactly as you would use gitlab():

my_gitlab <- gl_connection("https://gitlab.com",
                           private_token = Sys.getenv("GITLAB_COM_TOKEN"))
my_gitlab("projects")

gitlab_connection() can take arbitrary parameters, returning a function that issues API requests with these parameter values set.

As a convenience wrapper to directly connect to a specific project in a GitLab instance, gl_project_connection() exists.

function-in-function style

Instead of the query as character vector gitlab() and thus also all connections accept equivalently a function as first argument, that is then called with the additional parameters and using the connection for all API calls:

my_gitlab(gl_create_issue, "Implement new feature", project = my_project)

gl_create_issue() is an example function here, the principle style works for all convenience functions of {gitlabr} starting with gl_*().

Some of the convenience perform additional transformation or renaming of parameters. Hence, the parameters given to the exemplary my_gitlab(...) call after the function should be valid according the documentation of the respective function and may differ from names used in the GitLab API itself, although this is the case only in very few cases.

Alternative connections to projects

Creating connections

function-in-function style