Basic migration from SVN to Git

The basic migration from SVN to Git is detailed in this article:

Basic Migration from SVN to Git

Pushing to the new repository to server

Once the cleanup after the migration is completed, it needs to be pushed to the server so that the repository is available to everybody.

Create a new bare repository

Now that the Subversion repository has been migrated to git and cleanup has been performed. We need to move this repository into a git server repository. Here the goal is to do away with the Subversion link and make git as the sole repository.

So, the first step would be creating a bare (empty) repository.

Above command would create an empty git repository in the local directory you are in. Hosted sites like gitHub have gui interface to creating repository.

The config file in the appname.git directory will have the following config information. The refs will be empty.

This repository is now ready to receive the branches.

Push the branches

Go to the directory where you migrated the svn repository to git repository.

You need to tell that git repository that a remote server exits. A remote can be added with the following command:

In the above command, remsrv is the alias for the remote server – you could call it origin. And the parameter after that is the newly created bare server git repository. In this case, that repository has been created locally, but it would typically be on a server.

With this remote entry, the config file (in .git/config) will get a new entry for the remote:

The above configuration only allows for fetching. But here you will be pushing from the clean local git repository to the server repository. For that you need to add a Refspec for push:

That is essentially saying that take the branches in .git/refs/heads (these are local branches in the git repository we cleaned up) and put them in the server repository – projname.git/refs/heads.

If you want to do the same for tags, a similar refspec needs to be added.

Pushing the branches to remote

Now a git push will send all these branches/tags to the server repository.

You don’t need to specify individual branches – all of them will be pushed to the server.

Test with Cloning

Now you can discard the git repository that was created as a part of migration (obviously, in this case, you won’t be using Subversion anymore, but the newly created/filled git server repository will be used).

However, you can test whether the migration has been completed properly by cloning from that server repository:

You can check whether all the branches are showing up properly, by using: git branch -a. You can then go to a few branches and do a git log to see where the last commit was.

If you have a server setup, more than likely, there will be a username and password.

You can automate this with git config file.

As discussed in the above sections, you can first use the local machine as the server (using file:///...) Once that is successful, the code can be pushed to the final server.

This newly cloned repository (either from the local server or a ‘real’ server) won’t be bare, as you can see from below:

That completes the migration from Subversion to Git.

One-way migration from SVN to Git

You can find out more about the one-way migration from SVN to Git from this article (It also includes notes and thoughts on cleaning up the local git repository before pushing it to the server):

One-way migration from SVN to Git