rkalkani/gitlab-backup.md

Backup your GitLab repos to GitHub

GitLab recently decided to silently delete any repositories that hadn't been accessed in the last year. The announcement didn't go over well and they soon caved to public pressure and decided to instead back up inactive repos to object storage instead of unilaterally deleting them. I'm glad they reconsidered, but the experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth, so I decided to look into (relatively) low effort ways to transfer my repos out of GitLab.

The below is what I came up with. If people find it useful maybe I'll put it into a single script that can be run directly.

⚠️ NOTE: The below will back up your repos and any code within them, but does not back up other GitLab repository metadata like Issues or Merge Requests

Prereqs

To follow along you'll need the following installed:

Homebrew (Mac or Linux) installed, or a copy of Steampipe, and the GitHub CLI installed via other means
Both GitLab and GitHub configured for access over git+ssh

Backing up your repos

Create a GitLab personal access token

go to https://gitlab.com/-/profile/personal_access_tokens and make an access token with at least read_api permissions
Copy the personal access token from GitLab and store it in an env var:
```
export GITLAB_TOKEN="<your-token>"
```
Install Steampipe
```
brew install turbot/tap/steampipe
```

Install the Steampipe GitLab plugin:

steampipe plugin install theapsgroup/gitlab

Use Steampipe to retrieve all your project names and store them in the file projects.txt
```
steampipe query --output csv --separator "\t" \
   'SELECT full_path FROM gitlab_my_project;' > projects.txt
```
📝 NOTE: If you'd prefer to only backup projects that haven't had any activity in the last year you can replace the SELECT full_path... sql query above with this one:
```
SELECT full_path FROM gitlab_my_project WHERE last_activity_at < date(now()) - interval '1 year';
```

Mirror each repo to a local folder (./gitlab-backup) :

mkdir gitlab-backup; cd gitlab-backup
cat projects.txt | while read p; do git clone --mirror "[email protected]:${p}" ; done

Install the GitHub CLI (gh) if you don't have it, and make sure it's authenticated:
```
brew install gh
gh auth login
```
Create a private GitHub repo for each repo (you can remove the --private if you'd prefer to create public GitHub repos).

The below will put a gitlab- prefix in front of each repos name in GitHub, if you'd prefer not to add the prefix or to use a different prefix change the gitlab_prefix="" variable below
```
gitlab_prefix="gitlab-"
ls | grep '\.git$' | while read r; do
   gh repo create --private "${gitlab_prefix}${r%.git}"
done
```

Push each of your local repos up to GitHub

gh_user="$(cat ~/.config/gh/hosts.yml | grep user: | sed 's/.*: //')"
ls | grep '\.git$' | while read r; do
    echo ">> Mirroring repo '$r'"
    cd "$r"
    git remote set-url origin "[email protected]:${gh_user}/${gitlab_prefix}${r}"
    git push --mirror
    cd ..
done

(optional) delete your local copy of all your GitLab repos now that they're backed up to GitHub
```
cd ..
rm -rf gitlab-backup
```