Unable to recreate a Project

I have a user (In academia) that recently dropped a class. His account was removed from the gitlab-ce server. This user then re enrolled for the class. When he went to create his project for the class, he was denied.

Upon looking at the directory “/var/opt/gitlab/git-data/repositories/” his namespace was still there. When I looked inside this directory, it was showing the repository that was created before his account was removed.

I searched for the project using the web interface and can find no reference to it. If I try and clone it, it is denied as not being found. I have waited 4 hours and no clean up has happened.

Is there an easy way to remove this project?

thanks

You should be able to delete a project as an Administrator.
Just open up the project and select the “Settings” tab. At the bottom of the page, expand “Advanced Settings”. There’s a “Remove Project”. Removing a project will rename the project in the git repository to “project name+deleted.git” so that you can recreate the project with the same name.

I have tried that. There is no access to the project at all. I have read through the docs and am tempted to issue the commands found here: https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/raketasks/cleanup.html I just do not know how safe they are. Any advice would be helpful.

Can only say to do a backup and try.
BTW, which version of Gitlab are you using?

I have the latest installed.
gitlab-ce-9.5.3 from the gitlab repository.

I took a chance since and renamed the repositories on the HD to .git.old for each repo and then they were able to recreate the repos.

I appreciate your help.

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Can this person create other projects with different names or is it just the one name that they can not recreate? If you have bash shell access to the gitlab server perhaps you can find the folder on disk that is already there that needs to be zapped and zap it (rm -rf /path/to/that/dir)

They can create any repo except the 3 that were named before the account was deleted. There have been no issues since I applied the above which is your suggestion. Thanks for the reply.