No branches exist in new GitLab project

Question

I recently setup a new GitLab CE install for use in my office and every time I create a new project from the web UI it creates it completely empty, without any branches, including master. When a project has a master branch, I can go to commits > branches to create a new one. But the "Files" and "Commits" tabs don't exist in a completely virgin project.

The only way I've found to solve this is clone the repo locally, create a master branch, and then push that to the GitLab server.

But it would be really nice if it would just automatically create a master branch with no files (or maybe a .gitignore and README) by default, like GitHub does.

Is there a way to make it do this in GitLab?

I'm running the latest CE from the omnibus installer on CentOS 6.

Answer 1

In the current GitLab CE (version 8) empty projects promt to add a REAMDE.md:

which includes the following URL (with domain, group, project of my project) for adding README:

https://domain.com/group/project/new/master?file_name=README.md

The master branch can be unprotected only after the branch is created.