Will Gitlab aliases allow me to move project without breaking the exising paths

Question

I am planning to do some cleanup in my gitlab moving projects around (company grew a bit and we need to add a few more layers to the repository structure)

Now if I move a repo, then all existing code would break (old docker image paths, old git push/pull urls etc.)

I googled for project aliasing and found that there is an API that lets me create project aliases, but other than the endpoints this feature is completely undocumented and I cannot find it in the UI.

Does the feature work the way I think that if I would move a project foo/bar to acme/foo/bar then I could use both names for docker images, git clone/push/pull etc.?

Answer 1

Yes, and aliases are created for the web URL, git push/pull, etc by default when you move a project. See also What happens when a repository path changes for more information.

However you cannot move/transfer a project that has a a container registry with images. See the docs:

Moving or renaming existing Container Registry repositories is not supported once you have pushed images, because the images are stored in a path that matches the repository path. To move or rename a repository with a Container Registry, you must delete all existing images. Community suggestions to work around this limitation have been shared in issue 18383.