Converting a local Subversion repository to Git

There many articles there about converting a subversion repository to git, but I decided to write my article that describes the conversion of a simple subversion repository (trunk only) stored in the local file system. I have a couple of these repositories that I needed to convert to git and then push them to bitbucket.org.

Note that you will still need svn installed in addition to git. If you are using Mac OSX, svn used to be installed by default but that changed in Mountain Lion (10.8). Since I have XCode already installed, I just went to Xcode > Preferences > Downloads > Command Line Tools > Install. See details here.

Create the Authors Mapping File

The first step is to create a mapping file for the subversion users to the git users. With the help from here, I run the command below to create the initial mapping file. In my case, the local subversion repository is located at //Users/lerocha/svn-repo:

svn log file:///Users/lerocha/svn-repo | sed -ne 's/^r[^|]*| \([^ ]*\) |.*$/\1 = \1 <\1@example.com>/p' | sort -u > ~/authors.txt

Open the generated file (~/authors.txt) in a text editor and change it from this:

lerocha = lerocha <lerocha@example.com>

Into this:

lerocha = Luis Rocha <luis@luisrocha.net>

Convert to a local Git repository

With the help from this stackoverflow answer, run the following commands to initialize the local git repository and import the revisions from subversion:

mkdir repo
cd repo
git svn init file:///Users/lerocha/svn-repo --no-metadata
git config svn.authorsfile ~/authors.txt
git svn fetch

Your local git repository should contain all revisions from your local subversion.

Push to a remote repository

Since we want to push it to bitbucket.org (private repositories are free!), you first create an empty repository in bitbucket.org and then run the following commands below to push to it:

git remote add origin ssh://git@bitbucket.org/youruser/yourrepo.git
git push -u origin --all   # to push up the repo for the first time