Gerrit Owners Plugin

The owners plugin has the ability to parse the OWNERS file in the repository for defining who is the owner of the components in a repository and therefore is entitled to have the final word for the submission of changes associated with the files owned.

For details on how to configure either plugin, please refer to the docs in the specific plugin's folder.``

NOTE: A comprehensive introduction to both owners and owners-autoassign has been given as part of the GerritMeets series in Jan 2025. While a further deep dive specifically into newer features of this plugin was give at the GerritMeets in April 2026

This plugin exposes the has:approval_owners predicate that can be used with Gerrit's own submit-requirements to ensure that a change has been approved by the relevant users defined in the OWNERS file for the target branch of the change.

This allows the creation of a single repository with multiple nested projects, each potentially, used by different users/teams with different roles depending on the particular path where changes are being proposed. A user can be “owner” in a specific directory, thus influencing the approvals of changes there, but not in others, enabling great flexibility when working on repositories shared by multiple teams.

Building the plugin

This plugin is built with Bazel using an in Gerrit tree.

Create symbolic links of the owners folders to the Gerrit source code /plugins directory.

Create a symbolic link of the owners-common-api plugin to the Gerrit source code directory, which is needed as a pre-requisite for parsing the OWNERS file and the other utility functions for discovering it inside the repository branches.

a022e8a (Initial commit) Then build the owners and owners-autoassign plugins with the usual Gerrit plugin compile command.

Example:

  git clone https://gerrit.googlesource.com/plugins/owners
  git clone https://gerrit.googlesource.com/plugins/owners-common-api
  git clone --recurse-submodules https://gerrit.googlesource.com/gerrit
  cd gerrit/plugins
  ln -s ../../owners .
  ln -s ../../owners-common-api .
  ln -sf owners-common-api/external_plugin_deps.bzl .
  cd ..
  bazel build plugins/owners

NOTE: the owners-common folder is producing shared artifacts for the two plugins and does not need to be built separately being a direct dependency of the build process. Its resulting .jar must not be installed in gerrit plugins directory.

The output is created in

  bazel-bin/plugins/owners/owners.jar

To execute the tests run:

  bazel test plugins/owners/...

This project can be imported into the Eclipse IDE:

Add the plugin name to the CUSTOM_PLUGINS (and in case when you want to run tests from the IDE to CUSTOM_PLUGINS_TEST_DEPS) in Gerrit core in tools/bzl/plugins.bzl file and run:

  ./tools/eclipse/project.py