finishGoogleCodeGitHubWikiMigration

by Morgan Aldridge [email protected]

OVERVIEW

As you probably now know, Google is shutting down Google Code in less than a year and are encouraging users to switch to other open source hosting platforms such as GitHub. They have a handy Export to GitHub tool, which is easy, if a bit slow.

It appears to do a good a good job on the source code repository side of things, but has a few issues for project wikis (despite automatically converting to Markdown):

1. It doesn't preserve history or images.
2. It exports the wiki data into a separate 'wiki' branch, not the GitHub project wiki.

There's nothing I can do about the former, but I was able to easily automate resolution of the latter since GitHub allows you to clone project wikis to local repositories. Enter finishGoogleCodeGitHubWikiMigration, which--given an Google Code project exported to GitHub--takes the ProjectHome.md wiki page and makes it into the project's README.md file, plus moves all the wiki pages over to the GitHub project's wiki. It also fixes the page links in the docs. Much better.

USAGE

1. You must creat at least one page in your GitHub project's wiki (I just created the default Home page).
2. Change to a directory where you do not already have the GitHub project in question checked out (for safety reasons, it wants to work on a fresh copy and will not proceed if you already have a copy).
3. Run finishGoogleCodeGitHubWikiMigration [email protected]:<username>/<project>.git (replacing <username> & <project> with the username & project name, respectively, to be cloned from GitHub).
4. It should clone the repositories & do it's work, leaving you with two locally-modified repositories <project> & <project>.wiki, having committed its changes to each.
5. You should then go into each repository & review all the changes. I suggest at least a git log & git diff HEAD^1 on each.
6. If, and only if, you feel the changes are correct, you can perform a git push on each to commit the changes back to the repository on GitHub.
7. Lastly, you can delete the wiki branch and the <project> & <project>.wiki local repositories, if you like.

NOTE: This tool modifies the repositories, if you don't like the changes it makes, DO NOT push the changes back to GitHub!

You can also set the "project moved" flag on the Google Code project if you want it to permanently redirect to the GitHub project, but I've found you cannot revert the change.