How to Migrate a Git Repository from GitHub to Bitbucket | Hacker News Reader

How to Migrate a Git Repository from GitHub to Bitbucket

bluelabellabs.com

26 pointsomgbobbyg52 comments

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

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?

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.

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

GL is pretty great at the following: cost, permissions and CICD.

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-...

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).

I would strongly disagree that github's code review features are "great".

Better than both GitLab and BitBucket.

GitLab's feature set is similar if you fork over a few truck loads of money.

Not convinced - their review discussions, even on paid for editions are still worse.

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.

We are finally migrating to Bitbucket from Clearcase. Real sympathies should be for whoever is still stuck using Clearcase

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.

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.

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.

Hi, we added CI workshops into the docs in the past year: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/quick_start/ and worked on more learning resources at 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

Can you elaborate a bit more on the CI configuration problems you are running into? Thanks!

I've never really had any GitLab CI problems worth talking about and the key thing for us is how reliable it is. I've only ever used self hosted - maybe were you using their free / SaaS agents or something?

Working with Bitbucket feels like every click compiles a linux-kernel in the background.

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.

I know it's easy to slam Atlassian but Jira is still widely used.

I've found the ability to tie tickets to commits really nice. And it's CI is good enough.

Not saying it's better than other solutions use what makes sense for you.

>I know it's easy to slam Atlassian but Jira is still widely used.

So is Oracle and SAP ;)

Google will buy them in a few years and shut it down not long after.

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".

It's always been like that, in my experience.

In a past life we used Bitbucket for work and it's always been slow.

I experience exactly the same problem. After hitting the merge button, the UI sometimes reaches a completely inconsistent state.

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. Opened in 2014.

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.

bitbucket server is a very different product. It's not the cloud version that's been containerized.

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.

Why invest a lot of effort this year in a “new pull request experience” then? https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/try-the-n...

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.

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

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.

What's unethical about GitHub?

I was referring to the current controversy with licensing of co-pilot code and them serving ICE customers.

All of the enterprise US Intelligence Community developer platforms I worked on used the Atlassian suite. And, so far, all of the DoD ones I've been working on have used Gitlab.

Selling to military, spy agencies, and law enforcement is not in any way unique to Microsoft and GitHub.

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.

And the NSA. And vendor-locking-in accounts to participate in what should be decentralized git for source code management.

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.

It was cheaper for private repositories (free for teams less than 5) for a long time. I think Gitlab is cheaper now.

GitHub is cheapest.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Friendly reminder that BitBucket does not have a SLA: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bbkb/what-is-atlassian-s-bi...

... and it is down a lot.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com