notes

Moving a git repository to a new remote

I faced the following task.

We move all our git-repositories from our remote server to our brand-new instance of GitLab.

Obviously, simple git clone and git push to a new remote is not exactly what we want. We have way more remote branches on remote and for the branches a have locally they are not all on the current stage. The solution would be to check put every branch and pull it. The same with tags, we have a lot. The same for push. Simple git push pushes only one specific branch at a time.

It comes to a big pile of boring operations giving that I have about 20 repos.

Clone and push (including all branches and tags)

What I've found is git clone --bare command and git push --mirror

Let's take a look at the example

git clone --bare https://github.com/exampleuser/old-repository.git
cd old-repository.git
git push --mirror https://github.com/exampleuser/new-repository.git

See official docs from GitHub

Change remote

Another possibility to consider is add new remote. But you will need to pull and push branches and tags.

Some helpful command:

to see all your current remotes

git remote -v 

to change the origin

git remote set-url origin https://github.com/user/repo2.git

to just add a new remote keeping the existing

git remote add new_remote_name https://github.com/user/repo2.git

to remove specific remote

git remote rm <remote-name>

to rename a remote

git remote rename <old> <new>