Migrate repos between instances of Gitlab

I recently migrated from gitolite to gitlab and the official rake task gitlab:import:repos worked for me. I am using gitlab 6.1.0 (82f3446). Here is what I did:

• rsync bare repos from gitolite to repositories/{group}/. Make sure to replace {repository} with the name of the gitolite repo, and change the hostname of your gitlab server.

  rsync -rth --progress repositories/{repository}.git \
  git@gitlab-server:/home/git/repositories/{group}/
  

  Here, {group} is the name of the user group you want the repository to be added to. If you don't have any specific group, choose root as the group name.

• Fix permissions – only necessary when the rsync user is not git:

  sudo chown -R git:git repositories/{group}/
  

• cd ~/gitlab

• Run the rake task to import all new repositories:

  bundle exec rake gitlab:import:repos RAILS_ENV=production
  

Now if you login as Administrator you will find the new project added.

For more information, refer to the "Import bare repositories into GitLab project instance" under http://{your-gitlab-server}/help/raketasks.

In your case, you can login to your old TKL system and rsync all bare repos to the new instance, followed by an import.

One option would be to:

1. Clone the old repo from gitlab onto a dev machine.
2. Create a blank repo on the new gitlab.
3. Add the new repo as a remote on the dev machine.
4. Push everything back to the new repo.
5. Remove the old repo from remote repos list.

To create a remote called newRepo, do: git remote add newRepo gitlab.localhost.com:User/newRepo.git (replace the url on the end with the one for your repo)

I did it practically the following way after reading ChrisA answer, which gave me a little headache about how to do it practically. The example copies a repo from github to gitlab, to make source and destination a little bit clearer.

1. Clone the old repo from github onto a dev machine (which creates a bare repo):

   $ git clone --mirror [email protected]:me/myrepo.git
   

2. Create a blank repo on the new gitlab.

3. Add the new repo as a remote on the dev machine.

   $ cd myrepo.git
   $ git remote add newRepo [email protected]:me/myrepo.git
   

4. Push everything back to the new repo.

   $ git push --mirror newRepo
   

That's it.

This way it copied all branches and tags to the new destination.

You can now remove the cloned bare repo from your dev machine.