I have been fiddling with Gitlab and Specify for the last couple of sprints, and here is what I have come up with that seems to work for us.

A Scheduled pipeline that runs a job that only syncs with specify, and a bit of black belt shell scripting to diff the tokens, create a branch and push that if there is a diff, and create a merge request for that branch. I also added a simple json schema validation to it all so that I would catch designers deleting stuff more easily 😅

Here is a sd of the stages we go through

+1 on this. You could also do a generic git implementation where you would create a new ssh key, and we could add the public key to our git instance. That would work for both github, gitlab and probably alot of other brands running git under the hood.