CODEOWNERS "Contains owners which are not accessible within the project"

GitLab CI/CD
1

While debugging why mandatory reviews are not enforced in a repo, I noticed the project CODEOWNERS file is saying a lot of the entries “Contains owners which are not accessible within the project”, but the owners (all groups) all exist and are within the same parent group as the project. So what’s going on? The error message and documentation don’t seem to give any useful info. It also mentions “inaccessible” owners, but with no info on what that means or how to deal with it (except in the obvious case where the owner doesn’t exist).

What I’ve done to try debugging and working around this:

  • Removed spaces from [Section names].
  • Removed a section which contained no files.
  • Verified that two of the “inaccessible” groups do in fact exist within
    • the same subgroup as others which GitLab does not complain about, and
    • the same subgroup as the project where CODEOWNERS lives.
  • Removed everything in CODEOWNERS except a single entry: `/some/directory/ @root-group/subgroup/parent-group/group
  • Verified that https://gitlab.com/groups/root-group/subgroup/parent-group/group exists and has members.

All of the above had the same issue.

The repository is private, so I can’t share full contents.

2

Update: Fixed by inviting the group to the project.