46 lines
2 KiB
Markdown
46 lines
2 KiB
Markdown
---
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description: "Internal users documentation."
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type: concepts, reference, dev
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stage: none
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group: Development
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info: "See the Technical Writers assigned to Development Guidelines: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/ux/technical-writing/#assignments-to-development-guidelines"
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---
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# Internal users
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GitLab uses internal users (sometimes referred to as "bots") to perform
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actions or functions that cannot be attributed to a regular user.
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These users are created programmatically throughout the codebase itself when
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necessary, and do not count towards a license limit.
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They are used when a traditional user account would not be applicable, for
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example when generating alerts or automatic review feedback.
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Technically, an internal user is a type of user, but they have reduced access
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and a very specific purpose. They cannot be used for regular user actions,
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such as authentication or API requests.
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They have email addresses and names which can be attributed to any actions
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they perform.
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For example, when we [migrated](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/216120)
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GitLab Snippets to [Versioned Snippets](../user/snippets.md#versioned-snippets)
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in GitLab 13.0, we used an internal user to attribute the authorship of
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snippets to itself when a snippet's author wasn't available for creating
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repository commits, such as when the user has been disabled, so the Migration
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Bot was used instead.
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For this bot:
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- The name was set to `GitLab Migration Bot`.
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- The email was set to `noreply+gitlab-migration-bot@{instance host}`.
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Other examples of internal users:
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- [Alert Bot](../operations/metrics/alerts.md#trigger-actions-from-alerts)
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- [Ghost User](../user/profile/account/delete_account.md#associated-records)
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- [Support Bot](../user/project/service_desk.md#support-bot-user)
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- Visual Review Bot
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- Resource access tokens (including [project access tokens](../user/project/settings/project_access_tokens.md)).
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These are implemented as `project_bot` users with a `PersonalAccessToken`.
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