Migrating from Subversion to Git

This note contains the basic steps to migrate a simple Subversion repository with no branches or tags to Git. For more information, see the Git documentation or go to Stackoverflow.

First, create a list of all contributors to the SVN repository:

cd to-your-svn-checkout
svn log --xml | grep author | sort -u | perl -pe 's/.*>(.*?)<.*/$1 = /' > ~/svn-authors.txt

Edit the svn-authors.txt to include name an e-mail address of each author (it appears that Git requires that). The lines in the file should look like

bs = Burkhard Schmidt <bs@cpfs.mpg.de>
(no author) = No Author <no.author@cpfs.mpg.de>

The last line above avoids errors in the subsequent checkout. Now do a last SVN checkout:

git svn clone --stdlayout --no-metadata --authors-file=~/svn-authors.txt https://svn.cpfs.mpg.de/svn/my_repo

This will create a new Git repository in my-repo and checkout the SVN trunk into a new branch.

Next step: After creating a Git repository on your Github (we use https://github.molgen.mpg.de/bs/my_repo as the example here), add your clone:

cd my_repo
git remote add origin https://github.molgen.mpg.de/bs/my_repo.git
git push -u origin master

At the last step, you will be asked for your Github username and password. For HTTPS commits, this can be safely stored in the OS X keychain issuing

git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain

before the git push. Henceforth git will fetch the credentials from the OS X keychain.