Instance level LICENSE templates

Templates are important for easily getting started with a project and increase consistency between projects. If a company has a custom license they use for all their projects, it would currently need to be copied into every new project manually.

We should make it possible for LICENSE templates to be created in a central repository and be available to every project in the instance. Using a repository allows merge requests to be used to manage the process of changing the templates.

We should allow Admin's to select a repository to be a template repository for the entire instance. In the future we should extend this concept to support groups too.

Proposal

• Add a setting for Admins to select one repository to be the instance template repository
• Files in the default branch of the LICENSE directory of the template repository will be shown in the license template list when creating/editing a file. The instance templates should grouped separately from the default GitLab templates.
• The name of the template in the template list will be the name of the file
• The repository selected to contain the templates does not need to be public for the templates to be seen by all users via the template list

Links / references

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1602