Ability to immediately remove a project scheduled for delayed deletion

Problem to solve

GitLab 12.6 introduced soft deletion of projects for Silver/Premium and higher tiers. Removed projects are marked for deletion and removed after a period of time (default 7 days).

There should be a way to immediately remove a project in the soft-deletion phase.

Intended users

• Delaney (Development Team Lead)
• Devon (DevOps Engineer)
• Sidney (Systems Administrator)

Further details

InFrom GitLab 12.6, in Silver/Premium tiers, navigating to a project's Settings → General → Advanced → Remove project panel and clicking Remove project places the project in a soft-delete state. It is archived, and will be removed after 7 days, instead of immediately. From the project's settings, there is no way to immediately remove a project in this state. Projects can be restored before the 7 days are up.

Administrators can go to /admin/projects, find the project, and delete it immediately but GitLab.com customers do not have this access.

Proposal

From @jcgoble3's comment below:

1. User starts by soft-deleting the project as they do now.
2. Soft-deletion produces a dialog giving clear instructions on how to follow the rest of this process.
3. User navigates to the deleted project settings and clicks "Permanently delete now".
4. User confirms once by typing the project name again.
5. A second confirmation dialog, preferably a different and bolder color (red, maybe) asks for the user to type "Yes, delete permanently" so there is no question about what is about to happen.
6. User does so and the project is gone.

This basically makes it impossible to do by accident, but reasonably simple to do intentionally.

Mockup and prototype

Figma Prototype

delete container	initial modal	final confirm

Permissions and Security

Only users with sufficient permissions should be able to immediately remove a project. I am not sure if this is equivalent to the permissions required to mark a project for removal, or a more restricted subset.

Documentation

Project deletion adjourned period

Testing

What does success look like, and how can we measure that?

Project soft delete only occurs when the configuration option has been enabled at the group level.

What is the type of buyer?

Soft deletione is a Silver/Premium feature.

Links / references

#32935 (closed)

Possible workarounds

• On GitLab.com

  1. you can transfer the project to a namespace (such as a group) that is not on a paid plan as the feature is only available for Silver/Gold.
  2. Remove the subscription from the group before trying to delete the project.
  3. Turn off delayed deletion then delete the project.

• For self-managed, an admin can still delete the project immediately.