Feature request: Add unlisted repositories

[cmarshall108]

Add the ability to make repositories unlisted, meaning that these repositories are not listed under your account and are only viewable by users who are given links. For example, this would be very similar to that of unlisted Youtube videos...

[FullofQuarks]

This behavior already exists for private repos. You can then give read/write permissions for collaborators. In the case that you mean there exist a special link in which a user would be able to have full read/write (similar to YouTube), what would be the use case?

[cmarshall108]

My use case is i was applying for a job, they wanted to see source code from my previous projects. I did not want to open source the source code due to unrelated reasons... But i wanted the folks at the company to be able to read over my source code without having to have specific read/write permissions.

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[lunny]

If we could generate an encoded URL for a private repository which has an expired time, and then you can share it with others.

[cmarshall108]

Yeah that would certainly work.

[TheRealJP]

Is this still being added?

[miki725]

Another use-case is schoolwork. Submitting a link to a repo Professor can access without either creating account or making the repo public. Would be very useful if this feature is added.

[ivi9901]

I find this pretty usefull when you want to share something with someone that doesn't have an account, without having to make the source code searchable. The miki725 use-case is one of the best I can think of.

This is already added in gogs. I'm talking from the ignorance, but it might be possible to port that idea from there.

[6543]

thoughts: I would implement it as another visible level ... Private, Limited, Unlisted, Public

so for why nobody has implemented it ... to do this properly ... you have to refactor a lot :/ more explisit: rewrite the acces model for orgas&repos + migration

[a-hurst]

Chiming in here for another use case: occasionally the makers of specialized scientific hardware share their source code with researchers, but don't explicitly license it or post it publicly themselves.

If your team has a customized/patched version of that software, you can't exactly post it openly on GitHub or another searchable public repo, but you often still want to be able to share the code with others and deploy it easily on new machines. Unlisted repositories would solve the issue completely.

[s00500]

This would be really cool, gogs also added this feature reccently

[Mikaela]

I originally commented to https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/10375#issuecomment-936096872, but this would be better solution for my scenario.

I have a repository for learning Flask and it doesn't need to be public (anyone interested can find the upstream), but currently I have to make it public to share it to people learning with me unless they are willing to register onto the same Gitea instance that I am using and being public means it takes visibility from my real repositories.

[strlcat]

Any updates? That would be good at least for repositories

[xeruf]

Honestly, sounds like you want to have custom share links (otherwise it might be easily guessed) or maybe the ability to assign permissions to a generic "Guest" user representing non-logged-in users for a private repo. If there also was a generic "Authenticated" user, one could do away with Visibility settings completely and manage it all in the "Collaborators" Tab while also solving https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/15331.

For both of these, rather than Admin/Write/Read the permissions could be Write/Read/Unlisted, with the latter meaning they can read but only with the link.

[jgaehring]

This is already added in gogs. I'm talking from the ignorance, but it might be possible to port that idea from there.

Here is the pull request for that feature, in case it helps anyone else with an interest in contributing: https://github.com/gogs/gogs/pull/6176.

I'm also rather ignorant of this stuff, and have no real experience with Go, but I came upon this issue while looking around on AlternativeTo.net for a place to mirror a private GitHub repo with an unlisted URL, hopefully on a more FOSS-forward hosting service that I might migrate to more generally if I found I liked it. I'm encouraged by the fact that these kinds of community discussions and the open development process, as opposed to discussions like this that seem to go nowhere. Kudos, y'all! :pray:

And for my use case, I'm working on spec docs and draft proposals for a coop business model. I don't need absolute secrecy, but mostly don't want people stumbling on it without realizing it's in draft, not even prototype level, and making premature judgments. However, I do want to be able to share it with people who are not programmers (or even very technically savvy at all) with a simple share link that does not require an account with GitHub or any other hosting service. Since the repo's content is mostly markdown that I just wanted rendered as unfussy HTML, I'm realizing as I type this it might make better sense to setup my own unlisted static site for those documents, but I'd be eager to try it out with Gitea if this feature was added.

[xeruf]

@jgaehring sounds like a good fit for just setting up an own gitea instance and disabling search engine indexing at the HTTP level

[Cystemzz]

It would be nice to see some sort of update on this. I would be more than happy to spend my time submitting a pr in order to get this done!