SVN to Git Migration

SVN is a popular tool for code hosting. It is used to manage different versions of files like source code, documentation and more. It keeps history and project data. Subversion is an open-source tool and comes under the Apache License. It was operated much like CVS (Concurrent versions system).

Some other prevalent version control systems like Git are in trend now, but many projects are still running on the Subversion.

Git is an open-source and free tool for the distributed version control system. It rapidly handles projects with efficiency. It is used to coordinate the work among programmers.

If you want to move your project from SVN to Git, it is a straight forward process. You can make an SVN repository as a Git repository. There are many techniques to migrate an SVN project in the Git project. Here we will discuss the migration through Git native commands.

How to migrate a project to Git from SVN

To move the project from the SVN to Git, Follow the below steps:

Step1: Open a Git Repository

The primary step for moving an SVN project is to open an existing Git repository. If you don't have a Git Repository, create a new one. To create a repository, execute the below command:

$ git init

The above command will initialize an empty Git repository. We will migrate the SVN repository here. The next step is to copy the URL of the SVN repository.

Step2: Copy the URL of the SVN Repository

In this step, we will copy the URL of the SVN repository. To copy the Repo URL, open the SVN server manager (VisualSVN server manager in VisualSVN). Right-click on the repository and select the copy of the repo URL.

Step3: Run the 'git svn clone' command:

To clone the SVN repository as Git repository, run the git svn clone command. It will be executed as follows:

$ git svn clone <SVN repo URL>

The above command will make a Git copy of the SVN repository. It will prompt for SVN user access. Consider the below image:

Fill the user name and click ok to continue. Next, it will ask for the password. Enter the password.

Click ok to start copying the SVN repository. Consider the below output.

The above command will create a copy of the SVN project in the Git repository. Now we can send it to Git remote server.

To add a remote server like GitHub, run the below command:

$ git remote add origin <remote URL>

In the above command, the remote URL can be any Git service URL (GitHub or GitLab).

Now, to push this project on a remote server, run the below command:

$ git push origin master

Hence, we have moved an SVN project to Git. It is an excellent approach to migrate from SVN to Git. But there are two drawbacks to this approach.

• This approach doesn't create branches for us to push to a remote repository.
• This approach does not provide support for tags; we have to check out the tag as a branch and then create a tag from it. There is no process that we can move the tag from SVN to Git.

If you want to clone all the trunks, tags, branches, run the command as follows:

$ git svn clone <SVN_URL> -T trunk -b branches -t tags