I had been allowing normal users to create groups within Gitlab but subsequently discovered some confusion among users between groups and projects. Some users had been creating a group with a single project when a project with multiple members was more suitable.
A decided to update the Gitlab CE database to amend the users table and set the field can_create_groups to false for all existing users. First connect to the postgres database:
su - gitlab-psql
And connec tot the database via the local unix socket:
/opt/gitlab/embedded/bin/psql -h /var/opt/gitlab/postgresql/ gitlabhq_production
I checked the field names in the users table with:
\d+ users;
Then I performed a few counts to check the existing users:
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM users WHERE can_create_group=false;
Then I amended the users who could currently create groups with:
UPDATE users SET can_create_group=false WHERE can_create_group=true;
I did my counts again and saw that zero users now had that field set to true. So I added my own account and a few other admin users to allow them to create groups e.g.
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM users WHERE can_create_group=true WHERE email='admin.user@domain.tld';
