Import - Validation Failed: Title has already been taken

Summary

When Importing an export from CE Gitlab (GitLab Community Edition 8.17.2 bab14bdb ) the import fails with the error (screenshot below)

Steps to reproduce

Beleive it's similar to this - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/21319, for me doing the export / import fails every time. I have tried deleting all labels without any change

What is the current bug behavior?

Import fails

What is the expected correct behavior?

Import works

Relevant logs and/or screenshots

Output of checks

This bug happens on GitLab.com

Results of GitLab environment info

Exporting from GitLab Community Edition 8.17.2 bab14bdb

Possible fixes

I think it's related to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/21319 or possibly similar to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/17995#note_12899546

mentioned in issue gitlab-com/support-forum#1633 (closed)

@markmrichardson I don't think that you mentioned but is there an existing project with the same title as the project that you are trying to import?

added ~65372 label

@markglenfletcher No, I have tried the import 20-30 times and used a variety of names when doing the imports, and where I was doing the import to.

@markmrichardson Thanks for the update

added ~480950 import needs investigation and removed ~65372 labels

This is still happening with exports from GitLab Community Edition 9.1.3 2e4e522a

I met the same problem this week with the exact same error message. On my case I didn't delete any labels, I renamed all of them by adding an extra word in the name. Example: "Test" -> "Test label". After this, I could import my project from my personal gitlab server to gitlab.com

I wanted to export a project from a private hosted GitLab 9.3.5 and import to another server with same versions. I got the error: Error importing repository into tete/paramountplants - Validation failed: Title has already been taken
I don't know if it is connected, I tried to restore a backup, it created the projects, but did not restored the repositories (code, wiki).
versions:
GitLab 9.3.5
GitLab Shell 5.1.1
GitLab Workhorse v2.1.1
GitLab API v4
Git 2.13.0
Ruby 2.3.3p222
Rails 4.2.8
postgresql 9.6.3

added customer label

ZD: https://gitlab.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/81403

current customer needs this to become one of our biggest customers to date. https://na34.salesforce.com/0066100000F2KQn

My guess is that this has either to do with labels or milestones, and I think it's the former (without the tarball or the full stacktrace it's a difficult guess).

If I'm right, they can try removing these two lines from their import_export.yml (and restart the instance):

project_tree:
  - labels: #remove this line
      :priorities #remove this line

This may still preserve most of the labels, as long as they are used in some issue/MR.

They could also do the same with milestones (the following two lines from the same import_export.yml file).

Closing this for now as it was a DB inconsistency issue.

Basically, some labels ended up in the DB with an invalid title. This normally happens if there's a space in the end and there's also a label that exists without that extra space, meaning that when we sanitize the label at the import instance, this generates a duplicate.

Example: Export instance with non-sanitized label label1\s and label1, both will end up as label1 in the import, which will cause the validation error. The best solution, for now, is to get rid of the duplicate label and/or rename it.

In order to find those, we can run something like:

Label.where("title like '% '").where(project_id: project_id).map(&:title)

closed