Project templates in Gitlab upon creation

Question

What is the cleanest way to create a project in a self hosted gitlab with predefined (dynamically generated) files?

Concretely, I want to create a git repo on gitlab that upon creation contains all the files of a basic iOS project already. I just have to clone it and just start developing, instead of creating the project locally and then push it up to Gitlab.

Anyone?

I was looking into the gitlab-shell and the creation hook in gitlab-project: https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlab-shell/blob/master/lib/gitlab_projects.rb

Am I about to embark on a world of pain following this method? Is there something already out there that makes it easy to hook up at the application level?

Answer 1

For GitLab CE (or EE too, if you need more features than the standard templates provide) I propose using this set of tools:

• configure system hooks in GitLab to make it fire a POST request on project_create events,

• set up adnanh/webhook as a server that will receive these POST requests and then run egnyte/gitlabform app to configure the new project,

• create configuration for gitlabform with any files you need. Example:

gitlab:
  url: https://gitlab.yourcompany.com
  # You can also set in your environment GITLAB_TOKEN
  # this can be both private token OR OAuth2 access token
  token: "<private token of an admin user>"
  api_version: 4

group_settings:
  # this assumes that you create your new iOS projects in a "ios" group in GitLab
  ios:
    files:
      "README.md":
        # this will prevent resetting the file to below contents if it has already been customized
        overwrite: false
        # this will prevent the commit that applies this file change triggering CI build
        skip_ci: true
        branches:
          - develop
        content: |
          This is a default project README. Please replace it with a proper one!
      "other-file":
        branches:
          - develop
        # You can provide file contents with external file too. Both absolute and relative paths are supported.
        # Relative paths are interpreted as relative to `config.yml` file location.
        file: some-file.txt

See https://github.com/egnyte/gitlabform for more info about the features, more examples and a full config syntax description.

Disclosure: I am the original author of egnyte/gitlabform app and I have contributed to adnanh/webhook and therefore I like them both. :)