How I migrated my gitolite to Gitlab

Since I had more than 100 repositories in my old gitolite instance and I wanted to migrate to Gitlab a more easy-to-use solution, I developed a

Warning: This is not a finished script but merely a guideline which you need to modify according to your specific needs. I don’t have private repositories in gitolite, so all of my repositories are explicitly listed in the config files. Use on your own responsibility and make a backup! This does not change or delete any of your repositories in gitolite. Be sure to backup all your repositories in gitolite anyway, just in case!

# Configure git to not ask you for a password every time you are uploading.
git config --global credential.helper store
# Prepare list of repositories (check the text file and remove invalid names)
cat ~/gitolite-admin/*.conf |grep repo | cut -d' ' -f2 > repos.txt
# Clone all repos
mkdir repos
cd repos
for i in $(cat ../repos.txt) ; do git clone [email protected]:${i} ; done
# Push to Gitlab. This will automatically create a new project as your current user
for i in * ; do cd $i && git remote rm origin && git remote add origin "https://gitlab.myserver.org/yourusername/${i}.git" && git push origin master && cd ..; done 
# Don't forget to make a backup of your gitolite repositories in case anything went wrong!

This script uses the fact that you can directly push to a new repository on Gitlab, creating the project in the process. You don’t need to manually create the project.

While running this script, my Gitlab instance crashed two times while a repository was in the last stage of the git push process (this tended to happen for small kilobyte-sized repositories) due to heavy swapping induced by heavy memory usage. Restarting gitlab, and re-running the Push to gitlabpart of the script fixed this issue.

Note that git config --global credential.helper store will stay in effect, saving your git passwords in clear-text. In case you want to restore the default behaviour of keeping them in the RAM for 15 minutes, use git config --global credential.helper cache after running these commands.