I have found that only group owners can create projects on renkulab.io , even if they they are Developer or Maintainer on gitlab an have the permission to create new projects on gitlab.
Is this a bug?
Hello @mrawlik , that is actually on purpose. There are limitations for non-owners, making it difficult for us to create a fully working Renku project. For that reason, we decided to restrict creation to owners.
We should document this since the doubt is legit.
I see, thanks!
How powerful is creating a renku project, then? Should I worry about restricting it, or is the restriction due to purely technical reasons?
Is there a way I could cover a research-group scenario, where all members can create projects with visibility restricted to the group, but there is only one owner? Students should be able to create projects, but definitely not delete the group, for example.
The restriction is due to technical reasons: in short, we create a Renku project in the backend (similar to renku init on the CLI) and push it straight into a new repo from git; then we invoke a bunch of GitLab APIs from the UI to adjust a few details (display name, project visibility, running pipelines to build Docker images, …). Some of these actions require Maintainer permissions, and the git-push mechanism actually requires one to be Owner.
We should probably find a workaround; currently, this is a blocker for Maintainers – even though users can manually create a project in groups from GitLab as Maintainers.
If you need some restrictions, I suggest sticking to Maintainers (cause Developers have other annoying limitations), and either 1) asking people to create empty projects on GitLab first or 2) creating projects in their own namespace and then moving them to the target group.
Be aware that projects created this way need to be manually added to the Knowledge Graph; otherwise, they won’t appear on the search page. You can either manually enter the RenkuLab URL to index it right away or, simpler but slightly slower, load the Home page (or enter the search page), wait a few seconds, and you should see a banner mentioning to activate some newly discovered projects – See the screenshot below from our development environment
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