I have a personal project (on gitlab.com) which I would like to ‘donate’ to a group (also on gitlab.com). I have a colleague who’s a maintainer of the group, and he also wants the project to be moved into the group, so I feel like this ought to be possible.
The trouble is with permissions.
In order to transfer a personal project into a group, it seems that you need two things:
- You need to be the owner of the project. (I am)
- You need to be a maintainer of the group. (I’m not)
My colleague has the opposite problem. He is a maintainer in the group, but he’s not the owner of the project. Between the two of us, we have all the permissions that we ought to need in order to do this. But we still can’t do it, because the system needs one person to have both sets of permissions.
I really would like to make this a transfer, instead of a fork. Yes, he could make a fork of the project, and copy it into the group. But then I assume we’d lose all of the issues, and merge requests, and the container repository.
Is there a way around this?
You should give him owner access to the project. There is no way around this, unfortunately. These limits are enforced to avoid malicious usage of the feature.
You can maybe open a feature request on Gitlab to ask if they could implement a “offer to transfer” feature, where a user in your position invites another to take over a project.
@rpadovani Giving him owner access to the project would be a perfectly acceptable solution. 
Next question: how do I give him owner access?
(I didn’t know that was an option. I couldn’t find it in the docs.)
Thanks for your response. Now that I know it’s possible, I can go looking for the right way to do it.
@rpadovani I’ve looked at the “members” section on my personal project. He already has Maintainer-access. I have the option to change his access level, but I can’t change it to ‘owner’.
Is this definitely possible for a personal project? (It isn’t in a group, it’s just in my personal namespace).
@DouglasWinship I took a look around, and unfortunately at the moment it doesn’t seem possible.
This issue is about transfer a project from a personal namespace to a group, while this other is about having multiple owners in a personal project. Unfortunately, neither of them have been implemented yet, so I think the only solution would be having you as group owner to complete the transfer.
If, for any reason, you cannot be a group owner of the target group, you can create a temporary group where both of you are owners, and you first transfer your project from your namespace to the temporary group, and then the other maintainer “completes” the transfer.