I did some digging before asking in #gitlab on libera.chat:
16:48 <brennen> howdy. does anybody know if it's possible (in gitlab CE specifically) to disable private projects for individual users? 16:49 <brennen> that is, i'd like to let people create projects, but only public ones, for the majority of users of our instance. 17:14 <certifiable> brennen: There isn't deep granularity on that. You can restrict possible visibility levels (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/admin_area/settings/visibility_and_access_controls.html#restricted-visibility-levels) and prevent "Private". But then admins would be the only ones able to make projects Private. 17:15 <certifiable> There's no way to grant that right to a selected non-admin group of users.
Per the linked docs, this seems right, and I've applied that setting. Will need to confirm that a user can request an admin make a project private and access it the usual way. Once that's done, we can probably safely merge 699819.
To be clear, this assumes that we can set the policy to:
- Users may create publicly visible projects under their own accounts.
- Any team or user with a use case for a private project will need to file a request, which admins will evaluate on a case-by-case basis.
cc: @thcipriani, @greg for review on that decision.