Closing svn2github

13 Jan 2019 18:06

Almost exactly one year ago, I was planning to spend some more time on svn2github, (see svn2github: Next Steps).

Unfortunately, I never delivered on that promise, and to put it as directly as I can, I need to close the project altogether. (Please continue reading if you're interested in doing a similar thing yourself!)

History

svn2github has been up since 2011/2012 (based on whois data). That's been 7 years already! What started a little side project, stayed exactly that. I kept it running, because I've seen people use it. I'm extremely happy I could help, but this time has come to an end.

I created svn2github back in 2011 to help my team at Allegro deal with SVN dependencies to our Git project. We wanted to use Git for our PHP application and Git submodules for our dependencies, but at that point in time many mainstream projects were still using SVN. Then out of a weekend of quick Python coding, svn2github was born!

7 years later and most programmers don't know what SVN is anymore :-). Most projects are either hosted in Git or Mercurial with big corporations backing them (Microsoft, Facebook). Also it looks like git submodules didn't catch on and language-specific dependency management is used instead (npm for JS, composer for PHP, etc). I don't think anyone will miss svn2github, but if you will, please leave me a comment, I will gladly share some information on how to build a service like svn2github. Let me remind you it was born in one weekend!

Stats

Through the 7 years of operation, its users mirrored about 1300+ SVN repositories to GitHub. My single server running the project was down a few times due to not scaling properly when mirroring HUGE repos (that I needed to disable at some point to continue operating). After removing the HUGE repos, the repos mirrored to GitHub currently take about 200GB.

Plan forward

13 January 2019: This note posted
20 January 2019: Disable automatically updating the repos (can still add more repos, but this will be a one-time import operation)
27 January 2019: Disable adding new repos

I'm not going to remove repos from GitHub (unless someone requests it due to legal issues, etc).

Next steps

The biggest challenge running the project was making sure all of the 1,000+ repos are actually mirrored. If you have just one or two repos to look after, your job is much easier, in fact I created a little helper script to help you do just that. Please check the simplified "just one repo" host-yourself version of svn2github at this link: https://github.com/gabrys/svn2github

Thank you!

Thank you all for using the service. If you want to contact me, please leave me a direct message on Wikidot, or send me an email, or leave a comment.

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