Launchpad Help > Projects > Registering

Overview

Let's have a quick recap of how you can use Launchpad for your project:

• Use Launchpad's applications directly: bug tracker, code hosting, user support tracker, translations, specification tracker, distribution package build and hosting, file downloads and so on.

• List your project in the directory: gain publicity for your project, make announcements, link to your bug tracker, register your code and make it available through Bazaar.

Of course, you can pick and choose almost any combination of what Launchpad has to offer. The first step is to register your project.

Types of project you can register

You can register any free software project in Launchpad free of charge. To find out what we mean by "free software", take a look at our licensing policy.

Need a commercial subscription? If your project doesn't use a free software licence, you can buy a commercial subscription to host it with Launchpad.

If you're not sure that your project's licence is suitable, talk to us about it.

Quick tip: If you want to register a translation team or Ubuntu loco team in Launchpad, please create a new team, not a project.

Registration

To register your project, visit the page at Projects ⟶ Register a project.

Registration is straightforward. However, there are a few things to note:

• Name: the unique name Launchpad gives to your project and uses mainly in URLs. For example: Avant Window Navigator's name is awn.

• Display name and title: used on pages related to your project, these should be the project's full name. For example: Avant Window Navigator.

• Summary and description: both appear on your project's home page but only the summary is returned in search results.

Note that once you have registered your project you will not be able to change its name by yourself. If you wish change it you can ask an administrator to that for you, read the Feedback page for more information.

Project groups

Some larger free software projects are actually several related projects working under the same banner. For example: Firefox is part of the Mozilla project. Launchpad represents these as projects (Firefox) and project groups (Mozilla).

Project groups are useful because they give you one place from which to find all the information about the constituent projects.

To register a project group, file a support request with the Launchpad team.

Roles within projects

People and teams can take different roles within your project. For now, the two most important roles are:

• Owner: has full control of the project and takes all other roles in the project until they are filled by other people or teams.

• Driver: exists at both project level and for individual planned releases (called series in Launchpad). Can approve or decline bugs and blueprints targeted to future series. Effectively a project or release manager.

By default, whoever registered the project is its owner. However, you can change this to any other person or team in Launchpad by following the edit links from the project Overview page.

Similarly, you can set the driver for the whole of your project with Driver: edit on the Overview. However, it may be more useful to set different drivers for each series, as we'll see later.

Other roles that we'll look at in detail later on include:

• bug contact
• security contact
• translation group
• support contact.

Next step

Next up let's look at telling Launchpad how your project organises its different lines of development and releases.