Dev Home Feature Exploration: Dev Home repository management

[shakersMSFT]

Suggested new feature or improvement

Please Provide Feedback & Ideas!

Please let us know what you think about this feature by commenting on this issue! We'd love to hear your ideas and feedback!
Let us know:

• What do you like about the feature?
• What do you think is missing / what could improve the experience?

Overview

This issue outlines the proposed experience to manage your cloned repositories on your machine through Dev Home. Through this view you can see the list of repositories you have cloned through Dev Home, point Dev Home at repos you may have cloned outside of Dev Home, and any new repos you clone through Dev Home are automatically added to this list.

The Problem

Today a user can clone repositories onto their machine through Dev Home, but afterwards, there is no way for them to check which repos are cloned already, recently updated, or do any sort of management or launching of those repos.

Scenario

#	Scenarios
1	As a user, I have a repo management page in Dev Home dedicated to listing the repositories I have cloned to my machine. New repos I clone through machine configuration appear here, and I can point to existing repositories on my machine.
2	As a user, I can take action on my repos from within Dev Home such as opening them in my chosen tool or create a widget for that repo.
3	As a user, I can see relevant information about my repos from within Dev Home such as last updated, file location, and repository source (e.g. GitHub or Azure)

Additional details

No response

[Oldiesmann]

All of that sounds useful to me. I was surprised that I couldn't point to an existing repo on my own machine. Deleting the existing code just to re-import it seems like a waste of time and wouldn't be helpful at all to someone who has made changes that haven't been pushed to a remote repo yet

[HotCakeX]

Here are my feedbacks regarding Dev Home:

As a GitHub desktop user, i have lots of repos already cloned on my local storage, i'd like to add them to Dev home and manage them there. That'd be a start and would allow me to begin using Dev Home for the first time.

This feature should allow me to select a directory and automatically detect all of the repositories that reside in each sub-directory and add them to Dev Home.

SSH commit signing should also be added to Dev Home if it's not there already because i have vigilant mode turn on in my GitHub account so i don't do unsigned commits.

Thanks!

[totkeks]

I would like for DevHome to automatically manage the folder structure for all my repos. So, I don't have to pick a folder and don't have issues with duplicates/forks.

This could be based on the repository provider and could map the URL parts to directories on disk.

Using a base directory would help detection with Dev Home of existing repositories, instead of having to scan the whole disk(s) from time to time.

I solved this for myself using a custom PowerShell module that does exactly what I described, but doesn't come with a nice GUI like Dev Home does.

Benefit is:

• All repositories are in a clearly defined location
• Can handle all kinds of forks, duplicate names etc. of repositories, when they belong to different owners
• Can clone repositories from other providers than GitHub, like Bitbucket, GitLab, Azure DevOps or even private instances

[xyuxy4]

I would like DevHome to include a configuration wizard that quickly sets up a container environment based on cloned repositories or local repositories, and integrates with mainstream IDEs, just like GitHub Codespace. And users should be able to create and customize configuration files (such as Dockerfile, devcontainer.json, requirements.txt, environment.yml, etc.) according to their needs, and also these config files should be reusable across multiple repos.