orbit

name	orbit
description	Query the GitLab Knowledge Graph (Orbit) via the typed `glab orbit remote` CLI subcommands. Use for code-structure questions (who calls this function, where is this symbol defined), cross-project dependency and blast-radius analysis, merge-request and contributor queries, and any question answerable by traversing GitLab's unified entity graph (projects, users, MRs, issues, pipelines, files, definitions, vulnerabilities).
version	0.5.0
license	MIT
metadata	{"audience":"developers","keywords":"orbit, knowledge-graph, gkg, graph, query, glab","workflow":"ai"}

Orbit (GitLab Knowledge Graph) skill

Query the GitLab Knowledge Graph (product name Orbit) via the typed glab orbit remote CLI subcommands (shipped in glab v1.94.0+).

Do not use glab api orbit/*. The typed CLI handles the Content-Type header, response framing, and exit codes for you.

Discovery

glab orbit remote --help and glab orbit remote query --help are the authoritative usage references. Pass entity names to schema to get scoped properties — calling schema without arguments returns the full ontology (~28 KB) and is rarely what you want:

glab orbit remote schema MergeRequest Project   # scoped properties
glab orbit remote tools                         # full DSL JSON Schema

Running a query

Write the request body to a file and pass it to glab orbit remote query. Default output is llm (compact, agent-friendly); pass --format raw to pipe into jq. Endpoints are user-scoped — do not pass -R owner/repo.

cat > /tmp/q.json <<'JSON'
{
  "query": {
    "query_type": "traversal",
    "nodes": [
      {"id": "p",  "entity": "Project",
       "filters": {"id": {"op": "eq", "value": 278964}}},
      {"id": "mr", "entity": "MergeRequest",
       "columns": ["iid", "title", "state"]}
    ],
    "relationships": [
      {"type": "IN_PROJECT", "from": "mr", "to": "p"}
    ],
    "order_by": {"node": "mr", "property": "created_at", "direction": "DESC"},
    "limit": 5
  }
}
JSON
glab orbit remote query /tmp/q.json

filters is an object keyed by property name — not an array. Use either shorthand equality ({"state": "opened"}) or the operator form ({"iid": {"op": "eq", "value": 1216}}). Operators: eq, gt, lt, gte, lte, in, contains, starts_with, ends_with, is_null, is_not_null.

query_type dictates the top-level shape: neighbors and single-node traversal use node (singular); multi-node traversal, aggregation, and path_finding use nodes (array) plus relationships. max_depth and max_hops are capped at 3 server-side.

References

Topic	Location
Full DSL reference	references/query_language.md
Paste-ready bodies per query_type	references/recipes.md
CLI exit codes (1-5) and common errors	references/troubleshooting.md

Contributing

references/query_language.md is synced from docs/source/remote/queries/query-language.md. Edit the upstream file, then run mise run skill:sync:orbit. The lefthook orbit-skill-docs-sync job fails the commit if the two files drift.