How to register an account on GitLab. Due to spam, new accounts are locked until approved by an admin or the approver bot. Your GitLab account gets automatically approved within one hour if you are a member of Trusted Contributors in Gerrit, or a member of the Trusted-Contributors group in Phabricator and linked your Developer account to your Phabricator account. If none of these apply, you can file an unlock request to expedite access.
Support: mw:GitLab, how to host a project on GitLab, #wikimedia-gitlab on libera.chat, #GitLab on Phabricator.
Error logging shows that Phabricator can occasionally return a malformed response that is not valid JSON. By converting the JSONDecodeError to an HTTPError we give the requests library a chance to retry the query if that is still possible by config. If returns are exhausted we will still give a bit of a better clue about what went wrong than just letting the JSONDecodeError rip up the stack.