Create project from template

Description

Many companies have apps that form the basis for new projects. Sometimes these are explicit template apps, sometimes they're just the last app a developer worked on. Currently, cloning a project is mainly done via the CLI and involves several steps to fix the git remotes. We should make it easy to get started with a new project, by starting from an existing one. GitLab already supports forking a project, but that doesn't quite do it. For one, I can't fork from a group into the same group; I have to fork into a different group.

Proposal

Some options:

  1. Extend fork to allow people to fork into the same group, while changing the name and breaking the fork relationship.
  2. Add a Clone button.
  3. Extend the new project import options to include another project on the same GitLab install.
  4. Create first-class project templates, kinda similar to how we do .gitlab-ci.yml templates, but for entire projects instead of single files. Optionally (EE only?) let administrators manage their own list of approved templates.
  5. Leverage something like Heroku Buttons to let users find projects on their own, and then quickly clone them. (A key piece of Heroku Buttons is that there's a configuration file that specifies what a new version of the app needs, such as environment variables and add-ons, not just the code.)
  6. Extend template file handling to cover more and more files and groups of files. e.g. click to add a readme, click to add a Rails project, click to add a kubernetes config file.

Links

  • Inspired while working on gitlab-ce#19793