Steps to migrate from SVN to GitLab

gistfile1.md

Steps to migrate from SVN to GitLab

This process worked for me. I take no responsibility for any damage or loss incurred as a result of following or not following these steps or, for that matter, anything else you might do or not do.

Setup

• SVN is hosted at svn.domain.com.au.
• SVN is accessible via http (other protocols should work).
• GitLab is hosted at git.domain.com.au and:
  • A group is created with the namespace dev-team.
  • At least one user account is created, added to the group, and has an SSH key for the account being used for the migration (test using ssh [email protected]).
  • The project favourite-project is created in the dev-team namespace.
• The file users.txt contains the relevant user details, one user per line, of the form username = First Last <[email protected]>, where username is the username given in SVN logs. (See first link in References section for details, in particular answer by user Casey).

Versions

• subversion version 1.6.17 (r1128011)
• git version 1.9.1
• GitLab version 7.2.1 ff1633f
• Ubuntu server 14.04

Commands

git svn clone --stdlayout --no-metadata -A users.txt http://svn.domain.com.au/svn/repository/favourite-project
cd favourite-project
git remote add gitlab [email protected]:dev-team/favourite-project.git
git push --set-upstream gitlab master

That's it! Reload the project page in GitLab web UI and you will see all commits and files now listed.

Notes

• If there are unknown users, the git svn clone command will stop, in which case, update users.txt, cd favourite-project and git svn fetch will continue from where it stopped.
• The standard trunk-tags-branches layout for SVN repository is required.
• The SVN URL given to the git svn clone command stops at the level immediately above trunk/, tags/ and branches/.
• The git svn clone command produces a lot of output, including some warnings at the top; I ignored the warnings.

References

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/79165/migrate-svn-repository-with-history-to-a-new-git-repository/3972103
• https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/raketasks/import.md (this method didn't work for me)
• https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/4137 (describes why the above didn't work)
• https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlab-shell/issues/32

@swanandmehta you are just in time ;)