12 ms·

How to Migrate a Git Repository from GitHub to Bitbucket

26 points by omgbobbyg 5y ago

gravypod 5y ago
I'd like to send out my sympathy for any team members at companies moving to BitBucket. Good luck. In my experience the offerings of GitLab are far better
- gethub 5y ago
  Amen. GitLab: every thing but each thing is just okay GitHub: some things but each thing is great Bitbucket: some things but each is just okay
  - coding123 5y ago
    GL is pretty great at the following: cost, permissions and CICD.
    - gethub 5y ago
      The pricing has changed recently, grandfathered in organisations have reasonable pricing (relative to GitHub) but the pricing for new organisations is much more expensive than GitHub. You can compare GitLab on features, but if you want to use those features the pricing is not comparable (GitLab's $100/user/m vs. GitHub's $21/user/m). https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/01/26/new-gitlab-product-subscription-model/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/01/26/new-gitlab-product-...
      - gravypod 5y ago
        GitLab ultimate is a Jira competitor, not a GitHub competitor. GitLab Premium is ($19/month + runners + [optional] self hosting) vs ($21/month + possibly leaking your code/secrets in copilot). And, in my opinion, GitLab CI has a much better feature set and integration than GitHub's. You have so much opportunity to optimize the performance of your runners just off the bat. It's quite amazing especially for people with larger repos (ex: monorepo companies).
  - samsari 5y ago
    I would strongly disagree that github's code review features are "great".
    - richardwhiuk 5y ago
      Better than both GitLab and BitBucket.
      - gravypod 5y ago
        GitLab's feature set is similar if you fork over a few truck loads of money.
        richardwhiuk 5y ago
        Not convinced - their review discussions, even on paid for editions are still worse.
- dutchbrit 5y ago
  In our experience, BitBucket had a lot of issues the past year or so, mainly with Pipelines & hooks frequently being down (daily at some point for more than an hour at a time). They recently seem to have solved this issue - but I sometimes still have to wait a minute or 2 before a pipeline is started or merge is completed, quite frustrating. We're considering a switch to GitHub. Ps. Interesting how a post from 1 hour ago with 4 points has managed to appear on the frontpage. Has HN changed their algorithm?
  - gravypod 5y ago
    I'd recommend trying GitLab out a bit. It has a lot of cool features for multirepo companies like deployment integrations. Self hosting isn't too bad if you want to try out the more advanced stuff.
- secondcoming 5y ago
  Indeed, we moved from Bitbucket to Github and haven't looked back. I'm not huge fan of how GH deals with PR conversations, but that's a small thing.
- ynks366 5y ago
  We are finally migrating to Bitbucket from Clearcase. Real sympathies should be for whoever is still stuck using Clearcase
forgotpwd16 5y ago
There isn't anything GitHub or/and Bitbucket specific to this. That's just the procedure to copy (clone/push) a repo from one Git server to another. What about issues, PRs, actions, wiki, ...? GitHub isn't only used to host the code alone.
- xtracto 5y ago
  Right. At a previous place we migrated from Github to Gitlab, but we have to keep the GH repo for the merge request, approvals and paper trial. This for PCI and SOC2 auditing.
  - dmkirwan 5y ago
    That's interesting. Was Github Enterprise too expensive or was there another reason you didn't use it? What advantage did partially moving to Gitlab bring? This question is coming from a genuine place of curiosity, in case that's not coming across via text.
  - igetspam 5y ago
    Someone didn't understand compliance. To have painted yourself into that tight of a corner is just bad policy. I've been involved in half a dozen SOC2 programs and can't imagine how I'd actually be able to create that problem.
dmkirwan 5y ago
Ethical concerns aside*, I far preferred Github to BitBucket. Bitbucket has been incredibly unstable for the last few years that I've been using it at work. I regularly see the "We're experiencing issues..." banner when I review pull requests. We don't use bitbucket pipelines, but they seem to be the most unstable part of the product. I haven't used Gitlab in years so I can't give any up-to-date commentary on that as a solution. I've never had issues with Githbub and I quite like their UI so that will be my preference for the foreseeable future. *I appreciate this is a big caveat
- jackcviers3 5y ago
  Huh. Been using it for the last 5 years with pipelines over the last year and had no issues. The pipelines do require weird strategies for big scala compiles though.
- gtirloni 5y ago
  What's unethical about GitHub?
  - dmkirwan 5y ago
    I was referring to the current controversy with licensing of co-pilot code and them serving ICE customers.
    - toastal 5y ago
      And the NSA. And vendor-locking-in accounts to participate in what should be decentralized git for source code management.
    - dijit 5y ago
      This might not be concerning to you but they also had some run-ins with sexist and racist behaviour. It was what pushed my hobby group to Gitlab, though I recently set up github for my company as a temporary measure.
    - nonameiguess 5y ago
igetspam 5y ago
Step 1: Don't The only thing bitbucket has going for it is that it's the same biller as all the other mediocre software you're using most days. It's pretty awful.
- jackcviers3 5y ago
  It was cheaper for private repositories (free for teams less than 5) for a long time. I think Gitlab is cheaper now.
  - richardwhiuk 5y ago
    GitHub is cheapest.
temac 5y ago
It usually better to migrate git repositories with git clone --mirror than attempting to not forget refs with ad-hoc commands. For simple repositories their methods will probably work anyway, but it is still harder to do.
callmeal 5y ago
I don't know if somethings going on, but the last couple of weeks, Bitbucket has been incredibly slow, with pull request merges taking minutes for a tiny (< 14Mb) repo. Their This pull request is being merged in the background. This typically only takes a few seconds but may take longer. You can safely navigate away. banner is now completely familiar to our dev team. I've seen the merge sometimes randomly fail (refreshing that screen causes the "Merge" button to reappear and the pull request state showing as "Open".
- gtirloni 5y ago
  It's always been like that, in my experience.
- coldacid 5y ago
  In a past life we used Bitbucket for work and it's always been slow.
- robjan 5y ago
  I experience exactly the same problem. After hitting the merge button, the UI sometimes reaches a completely inconsistent state.
smcleod 5y ago
Bitbucket is horribly antiquated (along with all Atlasssian software IMO), why not go to GitLab - it's code management, merges request workflows and discussions are excellent for peer review and the CI/CD is fantastic.
- nix23 5y ago
  Working with Bitbucket feels like every click compiles a linux-kernel in the background.
  - dijit 5y ago
    I wonder if this is on purpose. Like starbucks burning their beans: to ensure a consistent experience across the whole franchise. `sleep(6)` on every click.
- RamblingCTO 5y ago
  We just switched from GitLab to GitHub because the CI is horrible and they changed the pricing to a very bad option in our case. Without adding features we use we would've had to pay four times the money. The CI just sucks, it's very flaky and just outright unstable sometimes. The configuration is pure horror. It takes ages to implement simple stuff. In two years I didn't get sonarcloud annotations on our damn pull requests to work. The UI just sucks. I don't know why you want to switch from GitHub to GitLab? We're happy with the switch.
  - dijit 5y ago
    This is so contra to my own experiences that I'm wondering if your gitlab setup was horribly configured..? Did you self-host? How did you deploy it? Gitlab CI has been "the best"(tm) self-hosted CI solution I've used.
  - dnsmichi 5y ago
    Hi, we added CI workshops into the docs in the past year: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/quick_start/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/quick_start/ and worked on more learning resources at https://about.gitlab.com/learn/ https://about.gitlab.com/learn/ The new CI/CD pipeline editor also improves the getting started experience, shown in a demo workshop in the GitLab 14 community meetup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSspEk8efHE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSspEk8efHE Can you elaborate a bit more on the CI configuration problems you are running into? Thanks!
orf 5y ago
Why would you ever willingly choose bitbucket over Gitlab? Does Bitbucket offer syntax highlighting when reviewing code changes yet? When we used it (before migrating to Gitlab) you had to install a third party browser extension. What a joke. Edit: nope, not yet: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD-8673 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD-8673. Opened in 2014.
- victorNicollet 5y ago
  For what it's worth, we use the Visual Studio Code extension for reviewing pull requests ; it comes with syntax highlighting and it's more performant than a web-based interface.
- gempir 5y ago
  I'm so confused why their Cloud offering is so different than their Bitbucket Server. Because Bitbucket Server had syntax highlighting probably for more than a decade now.
  - chii 5y ago
    bitbucket server is a very different product. It's not the cloud version that's been containerized.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  Atlassian has a separate tool chain, FishEye and Crucible, for code reviews. It's a separate product with a separate license and very few people seem to use it, but the Atlassian suite is meant to be a suite, as in many separate tools for specific purposes, instead of Gitlab's approach of having everything built into the core product. Atlassian's actual code review tooling is just as good as Gitlab's and really better because you can use it across arbitrary repo sources and don't actually need your code to be in Bitbucket or in a single repo or a single server at all. You're just not using it if you only use Bitbucket.
  - orf 5y ago
    Why invest a lot of effort this year in a “new pull request experience” then? https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/try-the-new-pull-request-experience-in-bitbucket/?src=jira https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/try-the-n...
jimmyswimmy 5y ago
My company has moved from gitlab to bit bucket. It feels like a huge step backwards. It's good to hear that I'm not alone in such impressions. I was afraid it was just me disliking change.
Lazare 5y ago
Migrating from github: Sure, lots of reasons why you might want to do that. Just being sure you can has value. Migrating to Bitbucket: Uh.... I don't really see any way in which Bitbucket is better than Github. Or, frankly, any other alternative. It exists due to inertia and/or to serve people irrevocably emeshed in the Atlassian ecosystem. I can understand why you might not have switched away yet, but switching to it?
billyjobob 5y ago
The killer feature of Bitbucket over GitHub was that they hosted Mercurial repositories. Since they stopped doing that and deleted all my Mercurial repos I haven’t seen any reason to use them.
javahippie 5y ago
Friendly reminder that BitBucket does not have a SLA: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bbkb/what-is-atlassian-s-bitbucket-cloud-sla-uptime-support-etc-447644045.html https://confluence.atlassian.com/bbkb/what-is-atlassian-s-bi... ... and it is down a lot.

26 points by omgbobbyg 5y ago

I'd like to send out my sympathy for any team members at companies moving to BitBucket. Good luck. In my experience the offerings of GitLab are far better

gethub 5y ago
Amen. GitLab: every thing but each thing is just okay GitHub: some things but each thing is great Bitbucket: some things but each is just okay
- coding123 5y ago
  GL is pretty great at the following: cost, permissions and CICD.
  - gethub 5y ago
    The pricing has changed recently, grandfathered in organisations have reasonable pricing (relative to GitHub) but the pricing for new organisations is much more expensive than GitHub. You can compare GitLab on features, but if you want to use those features the pricing is not comparable (GitLab's $100/user/m vs. GitHub's $21/user/m). https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/01/26/new-gitlab-product-subscription-model/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/01/26/new-gitlab-product-...
    - gravypod 5y ago
      GitLab ultimate is a Jira competitor, not a GitHub competitor. GitLab Premium is ($19/month + runners + [optional] self hosting) vs ($21/month + possibly leaking your code/secrets in copilot). And, in my opinion, GitLab CI has a much better feature set and integration than GitHub's. You have so much opportunity to optimize the performance of your runners just off the bat. It's quite amazing especially for people with larger repos (ex: monorepo companies).
- samsari 5y ago
  I would strongly disagree that github's code review features are "great".
  - richardwhiuk 5y ago
    Better than both GitLab and BitBucket.
    - gravypod 5y ago
      GitLab's feature set is similar if you fork over a few truck loads of money.
      - richardwhiuk 5y ago
        Not convinced - their review discussions, even on paid for editions are still worse.
dutchbrit 5y ago
In our experience, BitBucket had a lot of issues the past year or so, mainly with Pipelines & hooks frequently being down (daily at some point for more than an hour at a time). They recently seem to have solved this issue - but I sometimes still have to wait a minute or 2 before a pipeline is started or merge is completed, quite frustrating. We're considering a switch to GitHub. Ps. Interesting how a post from 1 hour ago with 4 points has managed to appear on the frontpage. Has HN changed their algorithm?
- gravypod 5y ago
  I'd recommend trying GitLab out a bit. It has a lot of cool features for multirepo companies like deployment integrations. Self hosting isn't too bad if you want to try out the more advanced stuff.
secondcoming 5y ago
Indeed, we moved from Bitbucket to Github and haven't looked back. I'm not huge fan of how GH deals with PR conversations, but that's a small thing.
ynks366 5y ago
We are finally migrating to Bitbucket from Clearcase. Real sympathies should be for whoever is still stuck using Clearcase

forgotpwd16 5y ago

There isn't anything GitHub or/and Bitbucket specific to this. That's just the procedure to copy (clone/push) a repo from one Git server to another. What about issues, PRs, actions, wiki, ...? GitHub isn't only used to host the code alone.

xtracto 5y ago
Right. At a previous place we migrated from Github to Gitlab, but we have to keep the GH repo for the merge request, approvals and paper trial. This for PCI and SOC2 auditing.
- dmkirwan 5y ago
  That's interesting. Was Github Enterprise too expensive or was there another reason you didn't use it? What advantage did partially moving to Gitlab bring? This question is coming from a genuine place of curiosity, in case that's not coming across via text.
- igetspam 5y ago
  Someone didn't understand compliance. To have painted yourself into that tight of a corner is just bad policy. I've been involved in half a dozen SOC2 programs and can't imagine how I'd actually be able to create that problem.

dmkirwan 5y ago

Ethical concerns aside*, I far preferred Github to BitBucket. Bitbucket has been incredibly unstable for the last few years that I've been using it at work. I regularly see the "We're experiencing issues..." banner when I review pull requests. We don't use bitbucket pipelines, but they seem to be the most unstable part of the product. I haven't used Gitlab in years so I can't give any up-to-date commentary on that as a solution. I've never had issues with Githbub and I quite like their UI so that will be my preference for the foreseeable future. *I appreciate this is a big caveat

jackcviers3 5y ago
Huh. Been using it for the last 5 years with pipelines over the last year and had no issues. The pipelines do require weird strategies for big scala compiles though.
gtirloni 5y ago
What's unethical about GitHub?
- dmkirwan 5y ago
  I was referring to the current controversy with licensing of co-pilot code and them serving ICE customers.
  - toastal 5y ago
    And the NSA. And vendor-locking-in accounts to participate in what should be decentralized git for source code management.
  - dijit 5y ago
    This might not be concerning to you but they also had some run-ins with sexist and racist behaviour. It was what pushed my hobby group to Gitlab, though I recently set up github for my company as a temporary measure.
  - nonameiguess 5y ago

igetspam 5y ago

Step 1: Don't The only thing bitbucket has going for it is that it's the same biller as all the other mediocre software you're using most days. It's pretty awful.

jackcviers3 5y ago
It was cheaper for private repositories (free for teams less than 5) for a long time. I think Gitlab is cheaper now.
- richardwhiuk 5y ago
  GitHub is cheapest.

temac 5y ago

It usually better to migrate git repositories with git clone --mirror than attempting to not forget refs with ad-hoc commands. For simple repositories their methods will probably work anyway, but it is still harder to do.

callmeal 5y ago

I don't know if somethings going on, but the last couple of weeks, Bitbucket has been incredibly slow, with pull request merges taking minutes for a tiny (< 14Mb) repo. Their This pull request is being merged in the background. This typically only takes a few seconds but may take longer. You can safely navigate away. banner is now completely familiar to our dev team. I've seen the merge sometimes randomly fail (refreshing that screen causes the "Merge" button to reappear and the pull request state showing as "Open".

gtirloni 5y ago
It's always been like that, in my experience.
coldacid 5y ago
In a past life we used Bitbucket for work and it's always been slow.
robjan 5y ago
I experience exactly the same problem. After hitting the merge button, the UI sometimes reaches a completely inconsistent state.

smcleod 5y ago

Bitbucket is horribly antiquated (along with all Atlasssian software IMO), why not go to GitLab - it's code management, merges request workflows and discussions are excellent for peer review and the CI/CD is fantastic.

nix23 5y ago
Working with Bitbucket feels like every click compiles a linux-kernel in the background.
- dijit 5y ago
  I wonder if this is on purpose. Like starbucks burning their beans: to ensure a consistent experience across the whole franchise. `sleep(6)` on every click.
RamblingCTO 5y ago
We just switched from GitLab to GitHub because the CI is horrible and they changed the pricing to a very bad option in our case. Without adding features we use we would've had to pay four times the money. The CI just sucks, it's very flaky and just outright unstable sometimes. The configuration is pure horror. It takes ages to implement simple stuff. In two years I didn't get sonarcloud annotations on our damn pull requests to work. The UI just sucks. I don't know why you want to switch from GitHub to GitLab? We're happy with the switch.
- dijit 5y ago
  This is so contra to my own experiences that I'm wondering if your gitlab setup was horribly configured..? Did you self-host? How did you deploy it? Gitlab CI has been "the best"(tm) self-hosted CI solution I've used.
- dnsmichi 5y ago
  Hi, we added CI workshops into the docs in the past year: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/quick_start/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/quick_start/ and worked on more learning resources at https://about.gitlab.com/learn/ https://about.gitlab.com/learn/ The new CI/CD pipeline editor also improves the getting started experience, shown in a demo workshop in the GitLab 14 community meetup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSspEk8efHE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSspEk8efHE Can you elaborate a bit more on the CI configuration problems you are running into? Thanks!

orf 5y ago

Why would you ever willingly choose bitbucket over Gitlab? Does Bitbucket offer syntax highlighting when reviewing code changes yet? When we used it (before migrating to Gitlab) you had to install a third party browser extension. What a joke. Edit: nope, not yet: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD-8673 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD-8673. Opened in 2014.

victorNicollet 5y ago
For what it's worth, we use the Visual Studio Code extension for reviewing pull requests ; it comes with syntax highlighting and it's more performant than a web-based interface.
gempir 5y ago
I'm so confused why their Cloud offering is so different than their Bitbucket Server. Because Bitbucket Server had syntax highlighting probably for more than a decade now.
- chii 5y ago
  bitbucket server is a very different product. It's not the cloud version that's been containerized.
nonameiguess 5y ago
Atlassian has a separate tool chain, FishEye and Crucible, for code reviews. It's a separate product with a separate license and very few people seem to use it, but the Atlassian suite is meant to be a suite, as in many separate tools for specific purposes, instead of Gitlab's approach of having everything built into the core product. Atlassian's actual code review tooling is just as good as Gitlab's and really better because you can use it across arbitrary repo sources and don't actually need your code to be in Bitbucket or in a single repo or a single server at all. You're just not using it if you only use Bitbucket.
- orf 5y ago
  Why invest a lot of effort this year in a “new pull request experience” then? https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/try-the-new-pull-request-experience-in-bitbucket/?src=jira https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/try-the-n...

jimmyswimmy 5y ago

My company has moved from gitlab to bit bucket. It feels like a huge step backwards. It's good to hear that I'm not alone in such impressions. I was afraid it was just me disliking change.

Lazare 5y ago

Migrating from github: Sure, lots of reasons why you might want to do that. Just being sure you can has value. Migrating to Bitbucket: Uh.... I don't really see any way in which Bitbucket is better than Github. Or, frankly, any other alternative. It exists due to inertia and/or to serve people irrevocably emeshed in the Atlassian ecosystem. I can understand why you might not have switched away yet, but switching to it?

billyjobob 5y ago

The killer feature of Bitbucket over GitHub was that they hosted Mercurial repositories. Since they stopped doing that and deleted all my Mercurial repos I haven’t seen any reason to use them.

javahippie 5y ago

Friendly reminder that BitBucket does not have a SLA: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bbkb/what-is-atlassian-s-bitbucket-cloud-sla-uptime-support-etc-447644045.html https://confluence.atlassian.com/bbkb/what-is-atlassian-s-bi... ... and it is down a lot.