For the script, find it on GitHub
Our company recently moved over 200 of our Git repositories from our self-hosted Gitorious server to the brand-new GitLab. Moving over to GitLab has completely changed our workflow. Gitorious hadn’t been getting updates and in fact the company has been bought by GitLab. GitLab offers unlimited users and repositories for free and has a really nice interface.
The problem is that we had over 200 repositories sitting on Gitorious so even a very busy day of a developer moving things over wouldn’t have been an efficient use of time.
We could just grab the information from the Gitorious database but the projects weren’t set up on GitLab yet. To do this, we had to automate adding new that. Fortunately, GitLab has a full featured and well-documented API for doing things exactly like this so we were able to hook into that. It took a while to get everything right but it’s been relatively painless and we haven’t regretted moving.
One big issue was that many of our servers are locked down and require a reverse-tunnel to get out. We had set that up on our old Gitorious server so after the migration, we slowly went around an fixed the reverse-tunnel to go to GitLab.
git remote set-url origin ssh://git@127.0.0.1:8000/gitlab-username/clientName.iPhoneApp.git
There were a few more issues that we slowly stumbled over but I’ll save them for a longer post. The GitLab API actually has an import_url parameter where you can tell it the URL of the Git repository you want to import and you don’t have do clone, push etc but the maximum file size is about 25 MB which wasn’t enough for us.
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