✨ SparkleLab

Sparkle your colleagues with praise. A low-stakes experiment with high-value learnings.

What’s SparkleLab?

SparkleLab is a lightweight service designed to explore modern access control models within GitLab, while doing something fun: helping GitLab team members show appreciation for each other.

We’re using this as a safe space for architectural experimentation. By integrating with real systems and encouraging real usage, we can validate assumptions, uncover edge cases, and collect meaningful data - all while spreading positivity.

Why SparkleLab?

The Authorization team is researching ways to evolve GitLab’s authorization stack. We need a real, functioning service that:

• Integrates with GitLab
• Encourages real-world usage and feedback
• Lets us model and experiment with RBAC, ABAC, and ReBAC

Key Use Cases

• Machine-to-Machine Integrates with Slack via a slash command to explore how external services can interact with GitLab-managed services.
• User-to-User Authenticates GitLab team members via our OIDC Identity Provider. We’ll simulate different access control scenarios (RBAC, ABAC, ReBAC) by adding artificial constraints on who can send praise - even though in reality, everyone can contribute.

Learn More

• Authorization Design Doc
• GitLab Handbook: Say Thanks

Getting Started

make setup
make run