Hints on migrating Google Code to GitHub (Shallow Thoughts)

Hints on migrating Google Code to GitHub

Google Code is shutting down. They've sent out notices to all project owners suggesting they migrate projects to other hosting services.

I moved all my personal projects to GitHub years ago, back when Google Code still didn't support git. But I'm co-owner on another project that was still hosted there, and I volunteered to migrate it. I remembered that being very easy back when I moved my personal projects: GitHub had a one-click option to import from Google Code. I assumed (I'm sure you know what that stands for) that it would be just as easy now.

Nope. Turns out GitHub no longer has any way to import from Google Code: it tells you it can't find a repository there when you give it the address to Google's SVN repository.

Google's announcement said they were providing an exporter to GitHub. So I tried that next. I had the new repository ready on GitHub -- under the owner's account, not mine -- and I expected Google's exporter to ask me for the repository.

Not so. As soon as I gave it my OAuth credentials, it immediately created a new repository on GitHub under my name, using the name we had used on Google Code (not the right name, since Google Code project names have to be globally unique while GitHub projects don't).

So I had to wait for the export to finish; then, on GitHub, I went to our real repository, and did an import there from the new repository Google had created under my name. I have no idea how long that took: GitHub's importer said it would email me when the import was finished, but it didn't, so I waited several hours and decided it was probably finished. Then I deleted the intermediate repository.

That worked fine, despite being a bit circuitous, and we're up and running on GitHub now.

If you want to move your Google Code repository to GitHub without the intermediate step of making a temporary repository, or if you don't want to give Google OAuth access to your GitHub account, here are some instructions (which I haven't tested) on how to do the import via a local copy of the repo on your own machine, rather than going directly from Google to GitHub: krishnanand's steps for migrating Google code to GitHub