Clone multiple existing Gerrit repositories to Gitlab

Question

we are migrating from Gerrit Code Review to GitLab in our office. I know how to clone one repository from Gerrit to GitLab. But in our office server we have around 50 or so repositories. I have tried transferring the repositories manually to GitLab's 'repositories' directory and then importing, but it only creates bare repositories. I'd like to know if there's a way to clone all the repositories in one go. Please help...

Answer 1

but it only creates bare repositories

That is what GitLab manages, as a Git Hosting service: bare repos that you can clone locally.

You could move those non-bare repo by:

• moving only the .git of your existing repo to GitLab repo folder, where each .git is renamed after the repo it was in:

  repo1/.git => /home/git/repositories/repo1.git
  repo2/.git => /home/git/repositories/repo2.git
  repo2/.git => /home/git/repositories/repo3.git
  

If you are talking about two different servers (hopefully both with the same OS), I would recommend tar cpvf repo1.git.tar /tmp/repo1.git: move in /tmp and rename first, then tar, and copy over that tar to the new server.

• transform those repos into bare one:

  cd /tmp/repo1.git && git config --bool core.bare true
  

• Try the Import process of GitLab (but there seems to be a bug in progress on that: issue/pull 5005

  bundle exec rake gitlab:import:repos RAILS_ENV=production

---

While the import process command is correct, the OP redmoses mentions in the comments:

If I just copy the repositories to /home/git/repositories, then the repositories appear in GitLab with no source files or no record of previous commits done in Gerrit.

To make this work this is what I did:

• Created a new directory inside the repositories directory
• Copied all the repos from Gerrit (was located in /usr/local/gerrit2/git) to the new directory.
• Then just simply ran GitLab's import process GitLab then created a group called "Dev" and imported the existing repositories perfectly.

And I didn't need to convert the repositories to bare.