Easier creation and sharing of Ghidra projects

Opening and analyzing a file in Ghidra currently requires a somewhat lengthy process of first creating a project, then importing the sample to this project, and then finally opening the file. Furthermore, sharing Ghidra projects with others is currently only possible with a Ghidra server, which is inconvenient because often there is no server that both parties have access to.

I am suggesting several changes to the way “non-shared” projects are currently handled, or possibly implementing a new project type called “local project” which is based on it, in the following manner:

• The .gpr file of a non-shared project seems to always be empty. I believe it serves no purpose other than being a file rather than a folder to open the project from. Furthermore, the .rep directory often compresses very well. I suggest to store the project as a compressed version of the .rep directory, as a single file.
• Ghidra currently refuses to open a project if the username does not agree with the value stored in the project.prp file - I am suggesting to completely remove this obstacle so people can share Ghidra projects simply by passing along the project archive.
• Finally, it would be very convenient if Ghidra could be called with the path to a file on disk as its parameter to directly create a project, import the file to it, and launch the CodeBrowser.

[mumbel]

Export/import already exists

[Martmists-GH]

Sorry for the delay on this.

I open the .gpr (not the .rep) in ghidra, and the only logs I get are:

2021-04-10 13:40:18 INFO  (DefaultProject) Opening project: /home/mart/git/ghidra_projects/firmware  
2021-04-10 13:40:18 INFO  (FileActionManager) Opened project: firmware  

However, it seems there’s no files other than an index in the idata folder, which is likely the issue here. I wonder why this is empty, considering I never wrote to the disk after a different partition got corrupted.