Getting started

You can go from nothing to a reviewed merge request in about five minutes. You need a GitLab token, credentials for one LLM, and a Linux or macOS machine.

What mrsentry does

mrsentry is a command-line tool that you usually run in GitLab CI. It does two jobs:

• AI merge request review. It clones the repository at the MR head, reviews the change with full-repository context, and posts inline comments on the exact lines, plus one overview note.
• Container vulnerability fixing. It reads High/Critical findings for your image from Amazon ECR and maps each one to the dependency that brings it in, direct or transitive, across Java, Python and Node.js/TypeScript. Then it fixes it, either in a new MR or inside the MR being reviewed.

Five-minute setup

1. Install

   On Debian, Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, RHEL or macOS:

   curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/devops-monk/mrsentry/main/install.sh | sh

   The installer brings its own Python 3.12, so the system Python doesn't matter. Other options, including Docker images, are in Installation.

2. Create a GitLab token

   Use a project or group access token, or a bot user's personal access token, with scopes api and write_repository and the Developer role or higher. The built-in CI_JOB_TOKEN can't post comments or push, so it won't work.

   export GITLAB_TOKEN=glpat-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

   If your company already keeps the token under a different variable name, point mrsentry at it with gitlab.token_env. See GitLab token.

3. Give it an LLM

   The default profile is Anthropic's Claude. Any LiteLLM model string works:

   export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-xxxx
   # or: --model azure/my-deployment, bedrock/…, openai/gpt-4.1, litellm_proxy/…

   Recipes for every provider are in LLM providers.

4. Check everything

   mrsentry doctor

   This checks tools, GitLab reachability, token identity, scopes and project access, sends a one-word prompt to your LLM, and, if AWS credentials are present, checks your AWS identity and ECR scanning configuration.

5. Review a merge request

   mrsentry review --mr-url https://gitlab.example.com/group/app/-/merge_requests/42 --dry-run

   --dry-run writes the overview to mrsentry-out/ without touching GitLab. Remove it to post the comments.

Where to go next