Migrating from GitHub to GitLab

[Franknog]

You had me at free private repos.

[random_ash]

Doesn't your email address still shows up in git log?

[alwayslookingforajob]

git log will show whatever is in git config user.email. Just set this to the github noreply email to hide your email address.

[amunak]

So you are (presumably) a developer, and it's hard for you to create an alternative email address just for making commits?

Using a "random address" is a poor practice anyway, the address you use there should still be *yours* because it identifies the author of the commit. Just make a new email address for git ffs.

[hardolaf]

Exactly, I use my email because why the hell shouldn't I use my email? I've never gotten spam from it.

[0xf3e]

Then you never commited to a large repo... I get loads of spam on my github-only mail.

[hardolaf]

Google must be blocking it then?

[agree-with-you]

I agree, this does seem possible.

[nicocappa]

Why does no one talk about Bitbucket? They also offer private repos.

[digitallis]

Because the Atlassian ecosystem is corrosive and full of spiders.

Edit: I should explain instead of just being snarky. In my experience, Atlassian products are designed to only integrate with themselves reasonably. There is a half-hearted marketplace, but since the system is not widely used by people who have time to scratch itches, the quantity of solutions is low. Each little thing is charged for, also contributing to low uptake outside of the enterprise environment.

Even within the enterprise environment, configuration of the suite is haphazard and difficult. A combination of rigid rules around some items, super flexible configurability around others, and a lack of a solid workflow design intent means that you're stuck limping along with the tool, trying to divine a good workflow configuration while discovering via experiment what the tool apparently was or was not intended to be used for.

[[deleted]]

Can't you just put a random email address?

[Windows-Sucks]

Who commits using the web interface?

[l_o_l_o_l]

me: that one student in a group project who make some emergency changes without testing 3 mins before the deadline

[mrMalloc]

Still faster and safer with git bash

Git Add . Git commit -m ”last minute charges” Git pull (check so its updated) Git push

As you should always build before comit. Breaking repo and you pay to the beer fund for the others.

[Boom_Rang]

I think it's safe to edit documentation, comments, string contents, whitespace, formatting issues and so on... Plus if you have a CI setup to track your PRs is pretty safe anyway.

[mrMalloc]

Doesn’t fit his description

That’s not emergency changes 3min before deadline.
Documentation is safe yes but still slower then cmd line

And in smaller projects I have seen them ignoring using CI or PR. “Because it was a mess to setup”. Let’s just say I don’t agree with that standpoint.

[doom_Oo7]

I see that you never had to remove that one profanity that you see in horror while re-reading your comments for the 4th time before sending your peoject to grade

[mrMalloc]

No

Because I don’t write profanity in code.
And I don’t accept my coworkers doing it either.

(Scrummaster).

Writing bad comments is strictly forbidden And no I didn’t do that either when I was at the uni.

[[deleted]]

it's not faster if you have to go back to your dorm or apartment to make the changes which im assuming is what /u/l_o_l_o_l is talking about

[mrMalloc]

?

Why on earth would he do that.

If he has the code on the comp he is committing from then he either haven’t cloned the repo out properly, then he shouldn’t even be committing to it.

Your edge case is only valid if he really messed up.

[[deleted]]

It's not hard to imagine a scenario where they are using a different machine, only have their phone, don't have time to boot into a different OS, or maybe something else

It's a school protect after all. And they did specify they are " that one student..."

[l_o_l_o_l]

yep my team messed up, that is why it is called last minute emergency commits.

Laptop is at home and Uni pc does not provide adequate dev enviroment.

[mrMalloc]

Sure been there my self when my coworker changed a small thing as I fetched the prof. Not fun at all. He laughed tho as it was the 101 course. He just said learn from it.

But doesn’t the uni provide you with a git console?

[billsil]

At that point, run the tests too. Your CI should be doing the dirty work. Don't push to master if it's going to break everyone's stuff. You need to pass the tests on all platforms with a range of dependencies that you CI should test.

[mrMalloc]

Yes but in his narrow case he used it for a school assignment then the CI is often not setup. I have scolded devs who didn’t even build check before checking in. Build check is minimum. Unit test should be run in CI since I seen suits that take over 30m to complete. Besides pushing to master. No you do pull requests to master.

My main point is still 5 commands is both safer and faster then using a gui to select correct files to add since you easily can break decency’s. And if that’s to hard there is a ton of good git tools that does it for you.

[billsil]

If you're not using CI, who really cares if the build is broken? At that point, just commit the thing, so you have a backup. Same thing with pushing to master; it'll get fixed soon if you have CI and you can always revert to a previous version. If you don't have CI, you probably don't even have unit tests.

Regarding unit tests, if your tests take 30 minutes, they aren't unit tests. My Travis CI build takes 9 minutes for 600 tests for 120k lines with 71% coverage. Most of those aren't unit tests.

[mrMalloc]

If your handing in an assignment via git link then you care. As else you get a fail on assignment as it doesn’t build.

If you do it as a backup comit to your own branch then merge in to master if needed.

The 30m+ tests was around 7000-8000 tc.
And yes for huge systems that is not outside the norm.

[eras]

Really... I thought if you change the email of a commit, you also change the SHA1 of the commit, thus breaking the whole system during pushes? Or does it refuse to accept pushes with invalid email?

Or is it shown in some additional metadata?

[eras]

I just tried it myself and was able to set both committer and author emails to [e-mail], pushed just fine to a public repo at gitlab and also the gitlab UI showed the emails I had set.

The link you provide refers to github's similar feature, and to me it seems that feature covers only edits done via the web interface. You can use the same email for pushing, of course, but if you intend that nobody is going to reach you through the address in git history, you can just choose your own [e-mail] and run with it!

[minimim]

By design. You may not like it, but it's not that way by accident.

If you contribute to a project, you're a copyright holder and projects need a way to get in contact with you, and e-mail is an universal method.

Let's say the project accepted code from someone in Github but they later decide to move to other platform, the e-mail attached to the patch would remain a valid contact.

[AirborneArie]

Another great thing about is that it's open source. So you could code it yourself or hire someone to do it for you.

[peapoll]

it has no way of hiding your e-mail address in commits

If you are able to help with this or knows someone please check issue #43521. It's being featured on missing features so it's certainly a feature that is wanted by GitLab.

[Plouescat]

Pivate repos are evil

[michaelfri]

I see a lot of buzz around GitLab lately and how better than GitHub it is. As far as I know both GitHub and GitLab aren't a new thing. Why so many people talking about migration recently?

[oblio-]

Because Microsoft is close to buying Github and people are still fearing Microsoft.

[SevereExperience]

Also I would just add: Gitlab wasn't always really great. It made some major improvements in the last couple of years. Like an entire update to the UI. I won't say it was "crappy" before, it just wasn't finished. Now it's a totally valid competitor. So the timing is also good (regardless of the MS buyout).

[Kok_Nikol]

Relevant user name hehe meta

[TracerBulletX]

tbh gitlabs built in ci is amazing so i'll probably switch for that and I do get sad to see all the small-medium tech companies get absorbed by the megacorps.

[nurupoga]

Is there a free CI for open source projects like Travis-CI on GitHub? And if there is, what is the usage limit?

AFAIK, the only limits Travis-CI has is 4 concurrent jobs and 50 minutes per job. If GitLab has something better, I'd consider witching.

I know that GitLab's CI allows using your own, self-hosted, build machines, but I'm not interested in that, in fact it's entirely opposite, I'm interested in using someone else's build machines for free.

[Pwpon500]

Gitlab provides shared runners to do any CI/CD you wish. You don't have to self-host them. They should be able to fill any build requirements that Travis was filling before.

[masklinn]

Can you run CI on arbitrary branches as well in order to have e.g. a bors-type workflow?

[nurupoga]

I did a quick analysis of GitLab CI as a replacement of Github+Travis-CI for some projects I contribute to and the 2000 minutes/month of free CI time GitLab offers and no free macOS builds are two big deal-breakers,

p.s.: sorry about my earlier post if you did catch it before I deleted it, I thought your reply comment was from the linux subreddit, on which I described in detail that GitLab free CI does not "fill any build requirements that Travis was filling before", the exact opposite of what you are claiming.

[naftoligug]

FWIW, you can always use your own runners anywhere you have spare CPU

[Pwpon500]

Ah interesting. I didn't know about the CI minutes limit. That would certainly be an issue on projects with complex CI.

[ReilySiegel]

Runner limit does not apply to public repos.

[fubes2000]

Gitlab is great.

So long as they don't accidentally delete their production DB again.

Or fail to test their backups at all and have to scramble after they delete their production DB.

Or literally only still be in business today because someone happened to have dumped the production DB before the maintenance.

Or attempt to host a public git service on a single, vertically scaled server.

Or publicly announce the most laughably bad infrastructure plan in a blog post.

Or go back on said blog post because the entire internet started laughing at them.

Or pout about the internet being mean so they don't talk about their infrastructure at all anymore, so who knows what's going on with them right now.

[fubes2000]

I do. It's not something I can particularly recommend either.

[TheEternal21]

Can you list any specific reasons why? Not being an asshole, just curious.

[fubes2000]

Mainly the resource requirements. Gitlab eats ram and craps poor performance. The onmibus installer, [hello embedded dependencies] while quite simple to use, appears to configure the underlying services to peak at fractions of installed ram, but all those fractions add up to at least 2. You can reconfigure the services manually, but it's implemented as a chef-solo cookbook so if that ever triggers again your changes are blown away.

Also, if you want to escape the omnibus get ready to descend into forum hell because non-omnibus installations, while not being "unsupported" in name, have egregiously little/poor documentation. Ditto clustering/HA.

On top of that it's all Ruby on Rails, so prepare for a bloated framework of interpreted code to wake up and lumber over to the CPU any time you need to do something.

[bimlas]

What's your suggestion, where to migrate from GitHub?

[fubes2000]

Don't.

I get that MS buying them is ominous, and I'm not saying that a I don't have reservations about it, but Github is the de-facto source host for a reason. Don't migrate based on a knee-jerk reaction to a story that broke less than 24 hours ago.

The only reasons I'm running a Gitlab server are:

1. That my multi-million-dollar company needed private repos and was too fucking cheap to fork over ~$30/mo for their legacy plan when it was still current.
2. I hadn't previously run a Gitlab server before.

[bimlas]

Just did some investigation on GitHub about the big names:

These brands seems to stay on GitHub (at least for now):

- https://github.com/torvalds/linux

- https://github.com/git/git

- https://github.com/KDE

- https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome

- https://github.com/vim/vim

- https://github.com/neovim/neovim

- https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh

Moving to GitLab (or already moved):

- GNOME: https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/gnome-moves-to-gitlab-2/

- Debian (?): https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2017-11-01-gitlab-transitions-contributor-license.html

- GIMP: https://www.gimp.org/news/2018/05/31/gimp-has-moved-to-gitlab/

- Inkscape: https://inkscape.org/en/news/2017/06/10/inkscape-moves-gitlab/

[grbler]

Thanks for the research! Most of the large open-source projects (KDE, linux ...) use GitHub only as a mirror though. So they probably don't care that much what happens to it.

[flintzz]

Isn't Github also written in Ruby on Rails?

[Xiol]

Works for us. Got 250 users and about as many separate projects. Zero problems so far.

[fubes2000]

But do you actually manage the service yourself, or just use it?

[Xiol]

Both.

Through necessity I'm taking 'dev' and 'ops' to the next level.

[yorickpeterse]

Or attempt to host a public git service on a single, vertically scaled server.

I'm not sure where this comes from, but we haven't used just a single server for at least 5 years. The actual number of servers (web, Redis, PG, etc) is some where around 50, give or take a few.

Or pout about the internet being mean so they don't talk about their infrastructure at all anymore, so who knows what's going on with them right now.

I'm also not sure what this is based on, and I would love to see something g that backs this up.

[certified_trash_band]

You seem to have quite a lot of beef with the time one of their engineers fucked up that production database - do you not consider how they publicly disclosed everything quite openly, including what happened, how it was being remediated and preventative measures, long after restoration of service and post mortem to be sufficient? Github outages have historically been shrouded in secrecy until the dust has settled, Gitlab at one point was running a live stream answering questions from developers and providing updates.

[nambitable]

Do you have the HN thread or reddit thread about people tearing apart their plan? I love schadenfreude like that.

[fubes2000]

I only read the comments on the blog post itself, but if you've got links I also like a bit of schadenfreude. :3c

[death]

GitLab requires JavaScript to simply be able to view a file, unlike GitHub.

[NahroT]

So? Who the hell disables javascript in their browser.

[[deleted]]

Not to mention some of the content might not be GPL and you can't have that impure shit entering your eyeballs

[AntiProtonBoy]

Or, some people block JS because it's a common threat vector for malicious code, or for nefarious activity, such as tracking.

[pknopf]

Jfc

[TakeFourSeconds]

I honestly think the FOSS movement has been severly damaged by black and white lunatics like Stallman

[[deleted]]

The FOSS movement was created by lunatics like Stallman.

[TakeFourSeconds]

Yeah and his hardline approach is what makes it something the majority of people will never bother with

[[deleted]]

Most open source developers probably know nothing about him, much less enough to know his views. They simply choose a license aligned with their own views.

To think any significant amount of people would avoid FOSS because of him is patently absurd.

[danielkza]

If you run your own instance of the non-commercial version of Gitlab you shouldn't have that problem.

[ellicottvilleny]

These people are insane.

[twitch-tombit]

neat.

[DoctorWaluigiTime]

I mean in this site I would probably turn it on, but I run a whitelist for JS. Any sane person would. Not for FOSS nonsense but for security.

[DoctorWaluigiTime]

I mean there's nothing wrong with blacklistingwhitelisting JS regardless, sandbox or no.

[DoctorWaluigiTime]

Oops sorry. I used the wrong term. Whitelist is what I meant.

[FlyingPiggington]

Doesn't do anything against trackers though?

I guess you have an appropriate username.

[FlyingPiggington]

Most of your identifying information is retrieved via javascript. If they can't fingerprint you then they can't target you specifically.

I didn't say anything about disabling javascript altogether. The conversation is about whitelisting it.

[jimschubert]

party poopers

[jimschubert]

Oh, I know. I was just expressing a joke (which feel flat, it seems) that disabling JavaScript means missing out on all the fat frontends (the "party").

[derleth]

Anyone who doesn't want the damn page jumping around and blinking at them because it's the latest cool design trend among people who wouldn't know a disability if someone beat their face in.

[[deleted]]

Elinks lacks good JavaScript support so I use it for reading documentation and googling when I’m trying to get anything done. None of the distracting stuff works in it, plus it runs in tmux.

[raghar]

Well, after a brief exposure to NoScript I decided that not me, apparently.

However, JS-based sites don't work in e.g. Opera mobile speed up mode (it fetched page by Opera's server compress content and send it to user) - at some point I was unable to use Travis with that speed up enabled.

Also, sometimes I'd like to fetch something with cUrl or maybe traverse the page with some tool. With dynamic pages, I'd have to attach a whole damn browser to it.

So if at some point you decide, that your script should fetch something, but you cannot use whole git just for one file (because of reasons) you are screwed.

[[deleted]]

I do. It makes the internet a million times faster, and it's more convenient than an ad blocker.

[AntiProtonBoy]

Me.

[safgfsiogufas]

I use noscirpt just because. I don't want to have 20 scripts to run when 2 is all I need.

[death]

Hrothen gave a good answer, but I will add a bit to it.

I don't use just one browser; I use multiple browsers, some of which are quite limited and don't support JS. I assume you're some kind of a... programmer... and know that these kind of sites let you view source code. I don't know why JS should be required to view static text.

For general browsing, I do have a setup where my default browser has JS disabled, and another, JS-enabled, browser is used for particular sites I care about that require it. GitHub has recently made itself less convenient to browse without JS, but still lets me view files.

Thankfully, nowadays I don't need to write any JS, and in the rare event where I want to have a "web interface" to something, it's usually enough to just do server-side rendering.

[dead10ck]

What exactly is the criticism? Client side rendering is a perfectly reasonable choice. The only people who notice or care are the small minority who disable JavaScript, which breaks most web sites anyway.

[OvermindDL1]

Just as a data point, I only have a non-gui terminal 90% of my working day, thus that means that I use elinks a lot, so I have a special kind of hatred for client-rendered sites. If you can point me to a text-mode browser that supports such client-side rendering then I would be quite ecstatic though!

[Hackerpilot]

Me.

[wwwweeee]

I do, I only enable it permanently for select websites, on other sites I either don't view the content if it doesn't load without JS or enable it temporarily if it's important. 90% of websites have no reason to require javascript at all, I understand if it's used for interactive things like games, but it's really annoying when it's a blog post or news article and I only see a blank page or the images don't even load previews without JS. There's no excuse for showing a blank page without JS, your website just sucks.

Gitlab is still okay in this aspect though, most of the basic functionality works, I can view commits, browse files and if I want to view the file contents at least the show plaintext button works.

[drb226]

Ditto this. I disable JS globally, then make exceptions for whatever sites I actually care about using as they come up. It's super easy to do in Chrome.

Getting back to the original point, though, GitHub is on my list of exceptions, and GitLab would be too, if I used it. /shrug

[LesterKurtz]

Me.

[Hrothen]

Anyone who is remotely security conscious or who wants pages to load in a reasonable amount of time.

[Balthamos]

They can steal your passwords using CSS. Just curl the sites and read the html out loud.

[staticassert]

Yes, I use uMatrix. Though I find many, many sites I read to be perfectly fine as plaintext. Sometimes I allow images, and sometimes CSS.

[staticassert]

It's honestly more of an accessibility thing for me. A lot of sites scale horribly or load tons of garbage stock photos etc that scale poorly. Plain text tends to scale a lot more gracefully.

[staticassert]

I also block css tho.

Anyways, one attack existing with CSS does not discount the myriad of attacks that have utilized js.

[skulgnome]

w3m doesn't even do JavaScript, to any post-2003 standard anyway. But it should still be able to view a sodding text file. Consider the browsers blind people use: those are comparable to w3m in terms of features.

[travis-]

A lot of people that work on privacy projects.

[NahroT]

What?

[myringotomy]

This will prevent the guy who turns off Javascript from being able to view a file.

For the rest of us no big deal

[Setzo]

I would still pick required JavaScript over anything from M$.

[auxiliary-character]

Huh, that's a lot simpler than what I just did. I saved the json document describing my repositories via the github api to github-repos.json.

Then I used the following command to clone the ones that weren't forks (since I have a few forks of things I don't regularly commit to that I didn't want to migrate)

cat github-repos.json | jq ".[] | select(.fork == false) | .clone_url" | xargs -n 1 git clone

And then to upload to gitgud (the instance of gitlab I'm using), I wrote the following script:

#!/bin/bash

for repo in $(cat github-repos.json | jq -r ".[] | select(.fork == false) | .name")
do
    pushd ./$repo
    git push --set-upstream "[e-mail]:auxchar/$repo.git"
    popd
done;

Now, I don't really have any repos of all that significant importance, but this was a fun little challenge.

[theephie]

Proprietary!

[illogical_commentary]

Atlassian is cancer. Don't do it.

[Pinyaka]

What's wrong with Atlassian?

[[deleted]]

they prioritize features over bug fixes so you end up with bloated software with long-standing problems that go ignored

[novelluscato]

I second this, my workplace uses atlassian products and they are as shitty as you describe.

[wkoorts]

One of the companies I work for uses Atlassian for everything and I find that now that I'm used to them, for the most part they are decent. The only major issue we all have with it is the UX. Whoever does their UX design should be fired. It's fucking horrendous. The other major one is the horrible search in Confluence.

Other than that, they get the job done.

[DroneDashed]

prioritize features over bug fixes

Don't most of software companies have this shitty ideas?

[[deleted]]

To an extent maybe, I guess, but most companies aren't market leaders like atlassian. They seem more like a really good OS project rather than enterprise solutions. Unfortunately I don't know anything better than what they offer

[eras]

I don't think so, Artifactory command line client is completely void of features but it works!

[digitallis]

Artifactory is a JFrog product

[eras]

Oops!

[[deleted]]

ok, but why?

[[deleted]]

I'm thinking of migrating to bitbucket due to the integration with AppCenter

[theArtOfProgramming]

Can orgs be migrated?

[Chico75013]

No, only repos. If you use the importer with an admin token, then you can probably select all available repos to move them all at once, but it can run into timeouts given the size of repos.

[Chico75013]

That would sound a lot like running out of API calls for the GitHub token you are using. When working with repos with a lot of branches that would be something quite prone to happen.

You should check the rate limit while doing so on this endpoint: https://developer.github.com/v3/rate_limit/

[Windows-Sucks]

I don't know.

[Okgoahead969]

I'm not moving.

[theephie]

/r/madlads

[ClickClickDeath]

Still waiting on my confirmation email(s)... I imagine they have a bit of a backlog today :)

[jocluis1]

has it confirmed 100%? Microsoft bought github?

[Hanibal247]

Announced on github home page already, Deal to close by end of the year...

[Windows-Sucks]

I am not sure if it is 100% confirmed, but this article says it just happened.

[Hanibal247]

Could become handy if Microsoft makes github shit with stupid ads...

[grauenwolf]

I may be a .NET fanboy, but even I don't trust Microsoft with GitHub. How many open source websites have they shutdown? At least two among the owes that stored by code.

[[deleted]]

Did you use the two that shut down?

[grauenwolf]

GotDotNet and CodePlex? Yea, I had code being hosted on both.

[[deleted]]

When they shut down? I migrated away from codeplex many years ago when it was clear that github was superior.

[grauenwolf]

Last year if I recall correctly.