SVN2GIT – An easy guide of migration

 

Hi,

I have recently spent some time trying to migrate several SVN repositories to GIT. The tool that I used was called SVN2GIT and the detailed steps can be found below:

1. Generate the authors.txt file.
2. Copy the authors.txt file to your local .git folder.
3. Open Command Prompt, navigate to your .git folder and run this command if your repo doesn’t follow the classic structure (/tags, /branches, /trunk):

 svn2git <svn_repo_url> –rootistrunk –authors authors.txt

      4. If your repo does follow the classic structure then you can choose to exclude the tags and branches folders to save time and disk space:

svn2git <svn_repo_url> –notags –nobranches   –authors authors.txt

      5. Go to the remote GIT server and create a new remote repository.

      6. Then you need to configure GIT for the first time:

git config –global user.name “your name”

git config –global user.email “your email”

N.B.: The GIT repository should remain as read-only until the whole team switches to GIT for all the projects.

If multiple SVN commits are performed after the migration please follow these steps to easily synchronize both repos:

1. Open Command Prompt
2. Go to your local GIT repository.
3. Run this command to import all the recent SVN commits into the local GIT repository:

svn2git –rebase

4. Run this command to push all the changes to the remote repository:

git push origin master

 

Atlassian has its own tool of migration but it needs more steps than SVN2GIT to migrate a repo.

 

In the next part I will present several issues that were found during migration:

Issue 1: The XML Response contains invalid XML: malformed XML: no element found at /mingsv64/share/perl5/site_perl/git/ra.mp line 312.

Explanation: This issue usually occurs when dealing with very large repositories (like mine) and when this command is applied on the root directory:

               svn2git <svn_repo_url> –notags –nobranches   –authors authors.txt

After tens of thousands of revisions being migrated this process stops due to unknown issues.

Solution: Instead of going on the root directory and exclude the /branches and /tags folders we went straight to the /trunk folder and ran this command:

svn2git <svn_repo_url/trunk> –rootistrunk –authors authors.txt

Issue 2: Global .GITCONFIG file may be located on a shared network drive (H :\).

Explanation: If you’re using a client computer that runs inside their corporate network then this situation is very likely to occur.

Solution: Move the .GITCONFIG file from the network drive to your local drive and add this environment variable GIT_CONFIG that points                 to your local folder.  If GIT_CONFIG is not working add the HOME environment variable instead.

• Moving the .GITCONFIG file to the C drive might cause permission restrictions. In this case move the config file to this location: C:\ProgramData\
• The local folder can be any folder of your choice. If there is only C: drive on the disk try and place it in here: C:\Program Files\Git\etc
• Check where .gitConfig file is located: git config –list –show-origin