Strategies for migrating from GitHub to GitLab
Ooh, that moment when you decide to move to GitLab ❤️
It's all great, until you realize there are all these loose ends you need to think about 🙈
- will the git commit authors be kept correctly after the import?
- can I migrate issues / pull requests ?
- can I just stop the existing CI pipeline or do other teams / projects depend on it?
These are some of the things I've had to think about while recently migrating the project I am working on to GitLab.
Here's what I learned.
I found there are 3 approaches to the migration.
#1. Migrate everything at once
This means you would:
- Start using the GitLab as hosted git repository instead of GitHub
- Use GitLab as CI for your project
- The previous GitHub project is closed
This is the most straightforward way to go and should be your first choice if possible 🚀.
#2. Migrate your CI pipeline first
This means you would:
- Keep using GitHub as your hosted git repo
- Use GitLab as CI for your GitHub repo
Why would you want to do this?
- If there are external dependencies on your GitHub repo - e.g. Jenkins pipelines owned by other teams that can't/won't update them immediately
- If you want to run both your "old" CI pipeline and the Gitlab one in parallel for a while, to make sure there are no regressions in how the artifacts are built
- If you want to allow users to get used gradually to the GitLab ecosystem (i.e. not disrupt day to day work by switching cold turkey)
This might sound a bit like overkill, but for a bigger organisation with multiple teams and a more complex release process, this could make sense.
Once the other teams have also switched to GitLab, you can make the full switch and no longer use GitHub at all.
#3. Migrate fully but keep GitHub as a read-only mirror
This means you would:
- Use GitLab as the hosted git repository
- Use GitLab as CI
- Keep the GitHub repo, but make it read-only
Why would you want to do this?
- If you have an open source project and you want to keep the visibility that GitHub brings
- If you want to migrate 100%, but still have external dependencies (as described in step #2) -> this option would bring the best of both worlds 💪
This is the option I wish I had thought of when I migrated my project 😀 I was too much "in the middle of it" that I only realised this could be an approach after I finished the migration with option #2.
What worked for you?
Did you go through a migration from GitHub to GitLab? How did you approach it?
Here are some things I learned while doing this:
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