Description

Discover self-hosted projects (that opt-in) from gitlab.com.

Proposal

Links / references

#4013 - Federate merge requests, feature proposal - search is a logical first step towards a federated GitLab ecosystem

Documentation blurb

Overview

Self-hosted GitLab projects are difficult to discover. An option to expose a self-hosted project to gitlab.com's search would greatly increase the exposure and viability of self-hosting public projects.

For self-hosted GitLab instances, provide an opt-in to gitlab.com search, which would push high level search details to gitlab.com, and potentially do things like keep track of "global stars" from gitlab.com users. The primary goal is discoverability of "external" GitLab projects, there deep search results (issues, merge requests, etc.) aren't necessary.

Benefits:

• Increase surface area of gitlab.com search
• Increase exposure of self-hosted projects
• Potential to mirror GitHub's "Explore this week on GitHub" email, across all participating self-hosted GitLab instances (How many interesting projects are buried in the Internet on self-hosted GitLab instances?)

Proposed UX:

• connect/authenticate gitlab.com account from self-hosted instance
• checkbox in project settings (and new project creation) to "Make this project discoverable from gitlab.com"

Use cases

Self-hosted GitLab projects that desire public exposure and discoverability.

Feature checklist

Make sure these are completed before closing the issue, with a link to the relevant commit.

• Feature assurance
• Documentation
• Added to features.yml