To Migrate from GitHub to BitBucket

Monday January 26, 2015

GitHub has great design and unlimited collaborators but no free private repos. BitBucket has unlimited free private repos but a limit of five collaborators on them. Assuming you want your repos private so that very few people have access to them, BitBucket is perfect.

BitBucket makes migrating from GitHub ridiculously easy. They have a one-click integration and everything. But it's harder to migrate issues.

Joe Workman made git2bit, which magically puts issues from a GitHub repository into a BitBucket repository. The systems aren't exactly the same, but it makes mostly intelligent choices for how to convert.

You already have Ruby installed, so it should be this easy to install git2bit:

gem install git2bit

Alas, git2bit depends on both bitbucket_rest_api and github_api, taking their most recent versions by default, and these two gems now require conflicting versions of hashie.

This is what I did:

gem install hashie -v 2.0.5
gem install github_api -v 0.11.3
gem install bitbucket_rest_api -v 0.1.5
gem install git2bit -v 1.0.2

At last! Use git2bit --help to see the fairly clear options.

It seems the default is to migrate only open issues, but if you use the --closed flag it will migrate both open and closed issues, which is what I wanted. Be aware that there's no checking for duplication, so if you run git2bit twice you will get double the issues on the BitBucket side. It's easy to make an empty repo to test that things are working as intended.

Other minutiae:

If you want to have a different identity for some repos (the ones on BitBucket, say) this is easy to set on a per-repo basis. These commands will alter a repo's .git/config:

git config user.name "Your Name Here"
git config user.email [email protected]

On BitBucket you'll want to Add an SSH key to an account and Use the SSH protocol with Bitbucket.

To point a current local repo up to BitBucket:

git remote remove origin
git remote add origin [email protected]:accountname/reponame.git

And if you didn't use the one-click migration but are instead doing your initial push to BitBucket from your local repo:

git push -u origin --all
git push -u origin --tags

That's just copied from BitBucket's directions when you create a new repo, which I like for being more complete than GitHub's.