DigitalOcean groups droplets into projects, but doctl compute droplet create puts new droplets in the default project and I couldnt see any flag to pick a different one. I wanted to create a droplet directly inside a specific project from the CLI. The thread is old (from 2019, closed 2024) but a maintainer answered how the tool itself does it, and that API flow still works.

doctl has no single flag for this because under the hood it does two API calls: POST /v2/droplets to create the droplet, then POST /v2/projects/$PROJECTID/resources to assign it to the project. So the way to do it yourself is to create the droplet normally, then assign it with doctl compute droplet add-to-project or the projectsassign_resources API endpoint. The maintainer confirmed thats exactly how doctl implements it, which is why the flow is stable. Source: https://github.com/digitalocean/doctl/issues/630