Create repo from claimed Netlify Drop site

I couldn’t find this elsewhere on the forum so hopefully this is something new.

It would be really cool if Netlify Drop could create a git repo from the site I just dropped? If I’m someone coming from a very “old skool” SFTP site setup I might only have a set of static files, which I’ll drop onto Netlify and then have no repo to link it to. It would be cool if when claiming the site you could create a repo on your account as a starting point :blush:

Just an idea!

@DavidDarnes Hmm. You’d still need a git repository set up somewhere, so either you’d have to set it up on the fly or somehow communicate the repository you were using. That seems a lot more complicated that just pushing your changes to your already-defined-and-set-up repository and then letting Netlify take over. Less monkey motion, and it eliminates the chance that you’d try to upload files with the same name as an existing repository.

That’s what I mean though, with Netlify Drop you can drop some code onto Netlify without a repo at all. Once that’s done you need to claim it, when you claim it asks for a repo. It would be cool if you could select to create a repo from drop, giving you some sort of starting point :blush:

Hi, @DavidDarnes. This is a reasonable feature request. There is one key reason I see it being unlikely to happen though.

This feature request is appreciated and thank you for suggesting it. I’m just sharing some perspective from within our organization relating to how we treat repositories in general (which, **spoiler**, is to treat them as “read only” currently). So, if this feature doesn’t get added, hopefully this will help to clarify some of the reasons why not.

Let’s take a look at the permissions our GitHub app grants. Here is a screenshot of the GitHub UI for the application settings page for the our app at GitHub:

Our app doesn’t have write or create access to repos. This make it impossible for us to create new repos at GitHub.

We do handle authorization differently with GitLab and Bitbucket but in all cases we currently do no “writing” to the repo of any kind (“writing” = git commit). We can update metadata related to the repo at the Git host (checks, commit statuses, and PRs) but we don’t make commits to the repos themselves.

Creating repos from a drop site would be a move in a direction where we would be modifying repos directly which is possible but is also something we have been completely avoid doing so far.

To summarize, while it is possible we will add this feature doing this would be a big change. Please keep this in mind if this change takes a while to happen (or doesn’t happen at all).

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Thanks for this! Very good explanation of the why. Essentially it’s down to security and being as light as possible with access while still having the integration.

This isn’t a feature I’m chasing for, but more something that would be cool for a new user to experience. Someone who’s more fresh to this ecosystem could have a GitHub account and not know how the two work together, something like this could be more a guiding flow. However, thinking about it more now, the “Deploy to Netlify” button is a somewhat guided flow but in a more typical direction (GitHub to Netlify, not the other way round).

Thanks again :blush:

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