Today I thought I would pass along a helpful version control migration tip. I've been writing software both personally and professionally for 14 years. As the years go by the way I use version control change and every couple of years I end up migrating from version control system to another. A few years ago I migrated from Subversion to Git.
I decided to move to Git for a couple of reasons, the biggest of which, is that Git is a distributed source system. What this means is that when you checkout a repo you have a full version of the repo on that machine. This allows you to work completely disconnected from any remote server. This becomes extremely useful if you work in a coffee shop, on an airplane, or somewhere that has no WiFi.
One thing that was pretty important to me was that I was able to keep my SVN history intact. I don't believe in checking in commented out code or leaving classes around that aren't being used. It clutters the system and makes the code more error prone. So I often heavily rely on my version control history to help me remember how or why I've done something that I've removed from the system.
So here are some pretty simple instructions that will allow you to migrate from SVN to Git and maintain your commit history. Make sure you have both git and git-svn installed on your machine before attempting these instructions.
This first step in the migration process is to go to where you have the SVN repo checked out that you want to migrate.
$ cd /path/to/svn/repo
The next step is to find, on the remote repository, where the SVN database with all revisions is hosted.
$ svn info
The output of that command will give you the url of the remote repository which I will later refer to as /path/to/remote/svn/repository.
The next thing we have to do is create the directory for our git repository.
$ mkdir -p /path/to/local/git/repository
$ cd /path/to/local/git/repository
Now that we have a place to put our new Git repository we need to initialize the repository from the SVN repository
$ git svn init /path/to/remote/svn/repository
After we've initialized the repository we can fetch all the revisions from the remote SVN repository.
$ git svn fetch
At this point you have now migrated your SVN repository to Git. Pretty easy huh? Checkout your commit history while you're here.
$ git log --graph
If you're using a remote server as your canonical source for your Git repositories (like Github) you should also push the local Git repository to the remote one on the master branch. In order to do that you need to first add the remote Git repository as a remote called origin.
$ git remote add origin git@your.remote.server:username/repository.git
Now that your local Git repository knows about the remote you can simply push your changes to the remotes master branch.
$ git push origin master
I decided to move to Git for a couple of reasons, the biggest of which, is that Git is a distributed source system. What this means is that when you checkout a repo you have a full version of the repo on that machine. This allows you to work completely disconnected from any remote server. This becomes extremely useful if you work in a coffee shop, on an airplane, or somewhere that has no WiFi.
One thing that was pretty important to me was that I was able to keep my SVN history intact. I don't believe in checking in commented out code or leaving classes around that aren't being used. It clutters the system and makes the code more error prone. So I often heavily rely on my version control history to help me remember how or why I've done something that I've removed from the system.
So here are some pretty simple instructions that will allow you to migrate from SVN to Git and maintain your commit history. Make sure you have both git and git-svn installed on your machine before attempting these instructions.
This first step in the migration process is to go to where you have the SVN repo checked out that you want to migrate.
$ cd /path/to/svn/repo
The next step is to find, on the remote repository, where the SVN database with all revisions is hosted.
$ svn info
The output of that command will give you the url of the remote repository which I will later refer to as /path/to/remote/svn/repository.
The next thing we have to do is create the directory for our git repository.
$ mkdir -p /path/to/local/git/repository
$ cd /path/to/local/git/repository
Now that we have a place to put our new Git repository we need to initialize the repository from the SVN repository
$ git svn init /path/to/remote/svn/repository
After we've initialized the repository we can fetch all the revisions from the remote SVN repository.
$ git svn fetch
At this point you have now migrated your SVN repository to Git. Pretty easy huh? Checkout your commit history while you're here.
$ git log --graph
If you're using a remote server as your canonical source for your Git repositories (like Github) you should also push the local Git repository to the remote one on the master branch. In order to do that you need to first add the remote Git repository as a remote called origin.
$ git remote add origin git@your.remote.server:username/repository.git
Now that your local Git repository knows about the remote you can simply push your changes to the remotes master branch.
$ git push origin master
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