My manager is very keen to be able to create branches with meaningful names from Gitlab. What we want is to encapsulate the issue number and epic number in the branch name, and have Gitlab know this, so that if you create an issue X in epic Y, then you can use the create-branch button in the issue page to automatically create a branch called epic-Y-issue-X_MyIssueName.
Is there a built-in way to do this? Could I simply create a plugin to add another button to the issue screen to do this automatically?
I don’t think there’s a way to do this automatically, certainly not on GitLab SASS.
By default the Create merge request button creates a branch called ISSUE_NUMBER-ISSUE_NAME, and provides a link to the issue in the MR description. If you don’t want that, the easiest thing to do is just create a branch manually and generate the MR from the Branches page in the project.
If you want something more automated, I guess you’ll need to create something manually, using the API and a browser extension.