Overview

This article provides an insight into the effective management of namespaces, particularly focusing on transferring the ownership and renaming procedures. 

These namespaces are shared for both self-hosted runner resource classes as well as any Orbs.

Prerequisites:

• To request a namespace rename or transfer, your team will need to reach out to the support team at CircleCI
• Only Organization Admins may request this

Renaming a Namespace

Renaming a namespace helps better align it with the organizational context or operational changes, such as organization acquisition, rebranding, and other requirements where organizations may want to rename their namespace.

1. Initiate a Rename Request: This starts when the namespace owner sends a request to rename the namespace using a support ticket.

2. Admin Approval: The organization administrator must be copied to approve this request or be the one to submit the request. 

3. Implementing the Change: Upon approval, the name change will be implemented. Do remember that renaming a namespace might affect codes or configurations that are dependent on the former name, so always perform checks to avoid errors.

Transferring Namespace Ownership

Transferring the ownership of a namespace revolves around passing the control from one organization to another. This is can be requested if a user accidentally claimed a namespace on a personal account/organization which their company wishes to use, or if the organization is migrating to another VCS provider.

1. Request Ownership Transfer: The current owner and admin of the namespace should initiate a request for an ownership transfer by contacting CircleCI support 

2. Approval by the Organization Admins: The organization admin must grant their approval for the transfer for both organizations on the support request.

3. Complete the Ownership Transfer: Once the admin approves the request, we will transfer the namespace over to the desired organization.

Additional Notes:

• We can only rename/transfer to a unique namespace which has not been claimed by another organization
• Organizations can only claim one namespace. We are unable to grant additional namespaces to an organization.
• After transferring a namespace, any self-hosted runner resource classes will need to be recreated

Additional Resources

• How to Identify your Organization's claimed namespace using the CircleCI CLI
• How to Rotate your Self-Hosted Runner Resource Class Tokens
• Orbs: Public vs. Private vs. Unlisted
• How do I find my org admins?
• Am I an organization admin?