Claus Witt

This past weekend I moved our work repositories from Subversion to Git. I have been using Git for my private projects for a couple of months now, and really wanted the same workflow and features for my daily work at VoiceArchive.

Installing gitosis
Even though I use github privately, I opted for the selfhosted version for our work-repositories. The reasoning behind this was mostly that we host our own subversion repo’s today, then we could just as well host our own git repo’s. (This also made the change possible without needing the company to pay more for hosting than we allready do).

I will not go through the installation, but just link to this excellent guide I followed to get everything up and running.

Creating repositories
When all users, roles and repositories have been saved in the file gitosis.conf – you are able to create local repositories for your projects and push the to the server. (This works just as with github, btw). Again instead of showing you an example I recommend the guide I used.

Exporting from subversion
The easiest part was exporting from subversion and commiting in git. Only downside was that the repository history was lost. But I still have the subversion repos as a backup, if I need them in the future.

Final thoughts
We are running Redmine and Hudson on our dev-server. Both were setup to use the git repository instead of the svn repo in just under 30 minutes. (And that included 5 projects). Apart from some splitting up of projects into minor parts this was pretty straightforward.