GitLab Milestone Burndown

Generate a burndown chart (CSV + PNG) for a GitLab project milestone by reconstructing remaining work over time. Works on GitLab Free because it does not use burndown_events.

Requirements

• Python 3.9+
• requests
• matplotlib

Install deps:

pip install requests matplotlib

Usage

Run via the entrypoint script:

python3 gitlab_milestone_burndown.py \
  --base-url "https://gitlab.com" \
  --project my-group/my-project \
  --milestone-iid 5 \
  --out-prefix burndown

Authentication

Provide a token with --token or set GITLAB_TOKEN.

export GITLAB_TOKEN=YOUR_TOKEN

If you need Bearer auth:

--auth-header Bearer

Done by label (instead of closed)

Use --done-label to treat an issue as done when a specific label is first applied. This uses the issue's label events.

python3 gitlab_milestone_burndown.py \
  --base-url "https://gitlab.example.com" \
  --project my-group/my-project \
  --milestone-iid 5 \
  --done-label Done \
  --out-prefix burndown

Options

• --milestone-id / --milestone-iid / --milestone-title (required, one of them)
• --start and --end (override date range, format: YYYY-MM-DD)
• --weights (use issue weights; missing weight counts as 1)
• --done-label (use label application time as done mark)
• --out-prefix (writes PREFIX.csv and PREFIX.png)

Outputs

• PREFIX.csv with columns: date, remaining, ideal, added_that_day, and closed_that_day or done_that_day
• PREFIX.png burndown chart

Project layout

• gitlab_milestone_burndown.py entrypoint
• cli.py argument parsing and orchestration
• gitlab_api.py GitLab API calls
• burndown.py burndown calculation and plotting
• models.py dataclasses
• utils.py time helpers