Migrate SVN to Git

So you have a svn source and need to migrate to a new version control using git. Below are the neecessary steps to do it.

Prequiresite

This’s done in CLI so you will need

• svn client
• git client
• git-svn otherwise, you will get an error

  1
  $ git svn -h
  2
  git: 'svn' is not a git-command. See 'git --help'.
  3
  Did you mean one of these?
  4
        fsck
  5
        show

Note

• {source}: path to the svn folder (Eg: ~/Document/code/svn/project-a)
• {target}: path to the git folder (Eg: ~/Document/code/git/project-a)
• {svn-url}: url to the svn source (Eg: https://svn.my-organization.com/code/svn/project-a)
• {git-url}: url to the svn source (Eg: https://git.my-organization.com/author/project-a)

Step 1: prepare the svn code base

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svn update

Also, resolve any conflicts if necessary

Step 2: create authors file

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$ cd {source}
2
$ svn log -q | awk -F '|' '/^r/ {sub("^ ", "", $2); sub(" $", "", $2); print $2" = "$2" <"$2">"}' | sort -u > authors-transform.txt
3
# `authors-transform.txt` is at `{source}/authors-transform.txt`

These 2 command will create a new file authors-transform.txt at the {source} directory with the following format:

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loginname = Joe User1 <user@example.com>
2
loginname2 = Joe User2 <user@example.com>

We will later serve this file to the git svn -A command. Read more about this argument in this documentation

Step 3: clone from svn

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$ cd {target}
2
$ git svn clone {svn-url} --no-metadata -A {source}/authors-transform.txt .

These 2 commands will fetch, then clone with commit message, file changes, …

Depend on how extensive your svn code base is. This process will take some time to complete.

1
$ git svn clone {svn-url} --no-metadata -A {source}/authors-transform.txt .
2
Initialized empty Git repository in {target}/.git/
3
  A  package-lock.json
4
  A  app/utils/index.js
5
  A  app/utils/Helper.js
6
  A  app/models/Test.js
7
  A  app/controllers/controller.js
8
  A  routes/index.js
9
  A  package.json
10
  A  config/index.js
11
  A  config/constant.js
12
r1 = e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4 (refs/remotes/git-svn)
13
  M  app/controllers/ApiController.js
14
  M  app/utils/Helper.js
15
  M  app/models/Test.js
16
  ...
17
  ...
18
Checked out HEAD: {svn-url} r592

• r1 is revision 1
• r592 is last revision. If your last revision is bigger than 1000, then you make yourself some coffe

Note:

• {svn-url}: url to the svn repository
• {source}/authors-transform.txt: path to the generated file in step 2
• .: there’s a dot (.) at the end of the 2nd command if you want to clone into {target}. It’s because we already cd to {target} at the 1st command.

Step 4: (Optional) create .gitignore file

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$ cd {target}
2

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# create .gitignore
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$ git svn show-ignore > .gitignore
5

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# add .gitignore
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$ git add .gitignore
8

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# commit .gitignore
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$ git commit -m 'Convert svn:ignore properties to .gitignore.'

Step 5: Add remote origin and then push

At this point, the local branch is master

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$ git remote add origin {git-url}
2
$ git push --set-upstream origin master

From now on, you good to go. Learn more about git-svn, and its basic examples