Migrate from Subversion to GitLab (FREE)

GitLab uses Git as its version control system. If you're using Subversion (SVN) as your version control system, you can migrate to using a Git repository in GitLab using svn2git.

You can follow the steps on this page to migrate to Git if your SVN repository:

• Has a standard format (trunk, branches, and tags).
• Is not nested.

For a non-standard repository see the svn2git documentation.

We recommend a hard cut over from SVN to Git and GitLab. Run the migration command once and then have all users use the new GitLab repository immediately.

Install svn2git

Install svn2git on a local workstation rather than the GitLab server:

• On all systems you can install as a Ruby gem if you already have Ruby and Git installed:

  sudo gem install svn2git

• On Debian-based Linux distributions you can install the native packages:

  sudo apt-get install git-core git-svn ruby

Prepare an authors file (recommended)

Prepare an authors file so svn2git can map SVN authors to Git authors. If you choose not to create the authors file, commits are not attributed to the correct GitLab user.

To map authors, you must map every author present on changes in the SVN repository. If you don't, the migration fails and you have to update the author file accordingly.

1. Search through the SVN repository and output a list of authors:

   svn log --quiet | grep -E "r[0-9]+ \| .+ \|" | cut -d'|' -f2 | sed 's/ //g' | sort | uniq

2. Use the output from the last command to construct the authors file. Create a file called authors.txt and add one mapping per line. For example:

   sidneyjones = Sidney Jones <sidneyjones@example.com>

Migrate SVN repository to Git repository

svn2git supports excluding certain file paths, branches, tags, and more. See the svn2git documentation or run svn2git --help for full documentation on all of the available options.

For each repository to migrate:

1. Create a new directory and change into it.

2. For repositories that:

   • Don't require a username and password, run:

     svn2git https://svn.example.com/path/to/repo --authors /path/to/authors.txt

   • Do require a username and password, run:

     svn2git https://svn.example.com/path/to/repo --authors /path/to/authors.txt --username <username> --password <password>

3. Create a new GitLab project for your migrated code.

4. Copy the SSH or HTTP(S) repository URL from the GitLab project page.

5. Add the GitLab repository as a Git remote and push all the changes. This pushes all commits, branches, and tags.

   git remote add origin git@gitlab.example.com:<group>/<project>.git
   git push --all origin
   git push --tags origin