Redmine to Gitlab migrator

Migrate code projects from Redmine to Gitlab, keeping issues/milestones/metadata

Does

• Per-project migrations
• Migration of issues, keeping as much metadata as possible:
  • redmine trackers become tags
  • redmine categories become tags
  • issues comments are kept and assigned to the right users
  • issues final status (open/closed) are kept along with open/close date (not detailed status history)
  • issues assignments are kept
  • issues numbers (ex: #123)
  • issues/notes authors
  • issues/notes original dates, but as comments
  • issue attachements
  • issue related changesets
  • issues custom fields (if specified)
  • relations including children and parent (although gitlab model for relations is simpler)
  • keep creation/edit dates as metadata
  • remember who closed the issue
  • convert Redmine's textile format issues to GitLab's markdown
  • possible to map to different users in GitLab
• Migration of Versions/Roadmaps keeping:
  • issues composing the version
  • statuses & due dates
• Migration of wiki pages including history:
  • versions become older commits
  • author names (without email addresses!) are the author/committer names

Does not

• Migrate users, groups, and permissions (redmine ACL model is complex and cannot be transposed 1-1 to gitlab ACL)
• Migrate repositories (piece of cake to do by hand, + redmine allows multiple repositories per project where gitlab does not)
• Migrate the whole redmine installation at once, because namespacing is different in redmine and gitlab
• Archive the redmine project for you
• Keep "watchers" on tickets (gitlab API v3 does not expose it)
• Keep dates/times as metadata
• Keep track of issue relations orientation (no such notion on gitlab)
• Migrate tags (redmine_tags plugin), as they are not exposed in gitlab API

Requires

• Python >= 3.4
• gitlab >= 7.0
• redmine >= 1.3
• pandoc >= 1.17.0.0
• API token on redmine
• API token on gitlab
• No preexisting issues on gitlab project
• Already synced users (those required in the project you are migrating)

(Original version was developed/tested around redmine 2.5.2, gitlab 8.2.0, python 3.4) (Updated version was developed/tested around redmine 2.4.3, gitlab 9.0.4, python 3.6)

Let's go

You can or can not use virtualenvs, that's up to you.

Install it:

pip install redmine-gitlab-migrator

(or if you cloned the git: python setup.py install)

You can then give it a check without touching anything:

migrate-rg issues --redmine-key xxxx --gitlab-key xxxx \
  <redmine project url> <gitlab project url> --check

The --check here prevents any writing , it's available on all commands.

migrate-rg --help

Migration process

This process is for each project, order matters.

Create the gitlab project

It doesn't neet to be named the same, you just have to record it's URL (eg: https://git.example.com/mygroup/myproject).

Create users

Manual operation, project members in gitlab need to have the same username as members in redmine. If you can't use same username in gitlab, e.g. migrating to gitlab.com, when migrating issues you can create a mappings file with yaml format, mapping redmine login to gitlab login, with

--user-dict <user dict file>

Every member that interacted with the redmine project should be added to the gitlab project. If a corresponding user can't be found in gitlab, the issue/comment will be assigned to the gitlab admin user.

Migrate Roadmap

If you do use roadmaps, redmine versions will be converted to gitlab milestones. If you don't, just skip this step.

migrate-rg roadmap --redmine-key xxxx --gitlab-key xxxx \
  https://redmine.example.com/projects/myproject \
  http://git.example.com/mygroup/myproject --check

(remove --check to perform it for real, same applies for other commands)

Migrate issues

migrate-rg issues --redmine-key xxxx --gitlab-key xxxx \
  https://redmine.example.com/projects/myproject \
  http://git.example.com/mygroup/myproject --check

Note that your issue titles will be annotated with the original redmine issue ID, like -RM-1186-MR-logging. This annotation will be used (and removed) by the next step.

If you don't have direct access to the gitlab machine, e.g. migrating to gitlab.com, and you want to keep redmine id, use --keep-id, it will create and delete issues in gitlab for each id gap in redmine project, and won't create issues with different title. If you have many issues in your redmine projects, it will be a slow process.

--keep-id

At least redmine 2.1.2 has no closed_on field, so you have to specify the names of the states which define closed issues. defaults to closed,rejected

--closed-states closed,rejected,wontfix

If you want to migrate redmine custom fields (as description), you can specify

--custom-fields Customer,ZendeskIssueId

If you're using SSL with self signed cerificates and get an requests.exceptions.SSLError: [SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed (_ssl.c:600) error, you can disable certificate validation with

--no-verify

Migrate issues get all users in gitlab. If you have many users in your gitlab, e.g. migrating to gitlab.com, it will be a slow process. You can use --project-members-only to query project members instead of all users, if corresponding user can't be found in project members, the issue/comment will be assigned to the gitlab admin user.

--project-members-only

Migrate Issues ID (iid)

You can retain the issues ID from redmine, this cannot be done via REST API, thus it requires direct access to the gitlab machine.

So you have to log in the gitlab machine (eg. via SSH), and then issue the commad with sufficient rights, from there:

migrate-rg iid --gitlab-key xxxx \
  http://git.example.com/mygroup/myproject --check

Migrate wiki pages

First, clone the GitLab wiki repository (go to your project's Wiki on GitLab, click on "Git Access" and copy the URL) somewhere local to your machine. The conversion process works even if there are pre-existing wiki pages, however this is NOT recommended.

migrate-rg pages --redmine-key xxxx --gitlab-wiki xxxx \
  https://redmine.example.com/projects/myproject \

where gitlab-wiki should be the path to the cloned repository (must be local to your machine). Add "--no-history" if you do not want the old versions of each page to be converted, too.

After conversion, verify that everything is correct (a copy of the original wiki page is included in the repo, however not added/commited), and then simply push it back to GitLab.

Import git repository

A bare matter of git remote set-url && git push, see git documentation.

Note that gitlab does not support multiple repositories per project, you'll have to reorganize your projects if you were using that feature of Redmine.

Archive redmine project

If you want to.

You're good to go :).

Optional: Redirect redmine to gitlab (for apache)

Since redmine has a common https://redmine.company.tld/issues/{issueid} url for issues, you can't create a generic redirect in apache.

This command creates redirect rules that you can place in your .htaccess file.

migrate-rg redirect --redmine-key xxxx --gitlab-key xxxx \
  https://redmine.example.com/projects/myproject \
  http://git.example.com/mygroup/myproject > htaccess.example

The content of htaccess.example will be

# uncomment next line to enable RewriteEngine
# RewriteEngine On
# Redirects from https://redmine.example.com/projects/myproject to https://git.example.com/mygroup/myproject
RedirectMatch 301 ^/issues/1$ https://git.example.com/mygroup/myproject/issues/1
RedirectMatch 301 ^/issues/2$ https://git.example.com/mygroup/myproject/issues/2
...
RedirectMatch 301 ^/issues/999$ https://git.example.com/mygroup/myproject/999

Known issues

Using Sudo

Using sudo functionality (enabled by default), issues and comments will preserve their author and timestamps. However, this will only work when the author is marked as 'admin' in Gitlab. As a workaround, either make everybody admin in Gitlab, or patch Gitlab. See gitlab-patches folder.

After patching, restart Gitlab: sudo gitlab-ctl restart

Gitlab issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/23144

Re-opened issues

This script looks as the closed_on field of the Redmine issue, which will be filled when the issue is first closed. If the issue is re-opened later in Redmine, the migrator will still mark it as closed in Gitlab.

Manual fix: lookup your redmine project id and fix in Redmine DB:

See if you have any re-opened issues:

SELECT issues.id, closed_on
FROM issues JOIN issue_statuses on (issues.status_id=issue_statuses.id)
WHERE issue_statuses.is_closed = 0 AND NOT ISNULL(closed_on) AND project_id = <your_id>;

To fix:

UPDATE issues JOIN issue_statuses ON (issues.status_id=issue_statuses.id)
SET closed_on = NULL
WHERE issue_statuses.is_closed = 0 AND project_id = <your_id>;

Develop / improving this tool

If you want to go back to a clean Gitlab state after migration, use these commands. All issues and uploads of the given project will be cleaned!

In sudo gitlab-rails console:

project = Project.find_by_name('your-project')
project.issues.each {|x| x.destroy }
project.uploads.each {|x| x.destroy }

To clean group milestones:

group = Group.find_by_name('your-group')
group.milestones.each {|x| x.destroy }

Further cleanup:

• Clean caches (will reset issue count in UI): sudo gitlab-rake cache:clear

Unit testing

Use the standard way:

python setup.py test

Or use whatever test runner you fancy.