A problem I've run into with GitLab is that it's quite annoying to view the variables of multiple projects and environments in one place. Projects inherit the variables of their parents, which means that getting a view of which variables apply to a particular project in an environment requires spelunking around the UI and working it out.
A benefit it has over a native GitLab UI is that it downloads and caches the project/group hierarchy in local storage (it's entirely client side), and can be refreshed on demand. It groups variables by environment mask and gives you a view of the entire variable hierarchy for a project.
Do you have an example screenshot somewhere? I'm wondering what exactly this does that GitLab doesn't, because inherited variables are shown within GitLab UI directly – fairly barebones, though, so I'm curious to see your UI in action. (I work at GitLab, but not on this – just a big CI fan myself.)
Unfortunately environment scopes are only available on premium so I can't demonstrate that, but it solves one of the major issues with the existing UI in that it doesn't give you an environment-centric variable view.
Also, it looks like it's only possible to view inherited variables when viewing the vars for a project. Group's don't show the inherited variables for their parents.
I also much prefer the project tree view to clicking around the gitlab UI so much, and when you're configuring a pipeline its quite tedious.
Thanks, sorry for the late response – busy week. Good point, wasn't even aware that the inherited variable view is only shown in projects but not subgroups. On a quick glance I couldn't find an existing feature proposal to add it at the subgroup level as well… but that might be because the search terms aren't terribly unique.
I'll show your demo to the team handling CI secrets, thanks again for sharing! :)
I figured I'd build my own UI to solve that, so I did. It's here: https://geevee.netlify.app/.
A benefit it has over a native GitLab UI is that it downloads and caches the project/group hierarchy in local storage (it's entirely client side), and can be refreshed on demand. It groups variables by environment mask and gives you a view of the entire variable hierarchy for a project.
Maybe some others might find it useful :)