Currently there's no official out-of-the-box integration available in Gitlab that would allow you to post messages via Matrix protocol. There are some 3rd party options available, like Gitlab plugin for Maubot, or the Slack-compatible Webhooks Matrix appservice, but it might not be ideal solution in some cases for one reason or another.

Note: The native support for including files from other non-public repositories was added in Gitlab 11.7, so this workaround is no longer needed.

Gitlab added new include statement for the CE edition of their product with the 11.4.0 release, which is great news. However there's this one minor thing mentioned in the documentation:

Note: The remote file must be publicly accessible through a simple GET request, as we don't support authentication schemas in the remote URL.

This makes it a little bit tricky to use the functionality if you want to fetch the file from private repository. Here's how I got it working. (TL/DR at the end)

Has science gone too far? It might look so, because:

1. It feels like a huge over-engineering to implement CI at home.
2. What would you integrate anyway?
3. Just why?

Well let me explain my reasons.