Enable the community to own and maintain project templates with little to no involvement of GitLab in the process

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Problem to solve

The ownership of our existing project templates is with GitLab. However, each of these templates addresses very different user groups and requires domain knowledge on the product management and on engineering side which is not available in GitLab. GitLab receives feedback and even MR from users that it cannot handle efficiently.

Proposal

The idea is to change the process entirely so that GitLab is no longer the owner of these templates, but provides a process for a "special interest community" to create and maintain a template (in a project) and link it to a catalog of project templates. Consumers of the templates can then pick them from the catalog and use them.

Also, private templates should be possible for organizations to manage and use.

This approach would align project templates with the Process for reviewing and accepting new or changed gitlab-ci.yml templates and the catalog approach that is currently developed for pipeline templates. This approach can also be used for project templates that contain issues.

Larger vision

Use templates not only for pipeline templates, repo templates, and issue list templates but for all sorts of things, such as

  • workflows consisting of e.g. MR approval rules and other settings
  • planning boards
  • analytics dashboards
  • custom role types (once we have that)

This will enable large enterprises to standardize, role out and enforce processes across the entire DevSecOps spectrum.

Intended users

Feature Usage Metrics

Edited by 🤖 GitLab Bot 🤖