Converting Mercurial folder to a Git repository

Question

I don't have a huge experience with Mercurial, I'm mostly a Git guy.

I would love to mirror a specific Mercurial folder/file in a git Repository. What I'm actually trying to do is to export the history of a file from a Mercurial repository to Git and being able to keep this in sync with future commits.

Do you have any suggestion on how to proceed? I believe that the way to go should be to get the history of the Mercurial patch, periodically export every single commit as a patch and apply the Mercurial patches to the Git repository.

Bedivere

Nowadays, GitHub.com will import it for you. – Atelectasis

Related: a good walk-through on git-scm.com: git-scm.com/book/en/v2/… – Amasa

Answer 1

On Linux or anything with bash/sh or similar, or python, try with fast export:

cd
git clone git://repo.or.cz/fast-export.git
git init git_repo
cd git_repo
~/fast-export/hg-fast-export.sh -r /path/to/old/mercurial_repo
git checkout HEAD

Spall

I know about fast-export, but it doesn't solve my issue because it exports the entire repo and the original repo is more than 1.5GB. – Bedivere

Ok, you want to keep git synchronize with mercurial ? Like this ? – Spall

Or you can use Mercurial outgoing hook to push to git ? – Spall

I have no control over the original HG repository, I need each new commit to be submitted also in the GIT repo by pulling the original HG repo. – Bedivere

Note that '/path/to/old/mercurial_repo' must be a path on the file system (not a URL), so you have to clone the original repository before. – Democratize

In my case had to use PYTHON=python2 ~/fast-export/hg-fast-export.sh -r /path/to/old/mercurial_repo. Apart from that, it worked flawlessly. – Afrit

Thanks for concise answer! I had to sudo easy_install mercurial first. Would be nice to have in the instructions – Aguiar

If you are on Windows machine use the Git bash and run hg-fast-export.sh – Dissertate

I had to run PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/:$PYTHONPATH because hg-fast-export depends on Mercurial as a library. – Lebrun

If you are getting the error ImportError: cannot import name revsymbol the simplest solution is downgrading fast-export to v180317, that is cd ~/fast-export; git checkout v180317. More details here. – Smoking

I wrote a quick post on my blog with some more details to convert a Mercurial repository to Git. There are also some tips if you are using Bitbucket. – Smoking

@MarcusWestin is there a way to do this without that command? I don't have sudo permissions on my machine so I can't execute that to install the module "mercurial" – Nellie

The repo.or.cz site might be slow to respond. It also lives on github.com/frej/fast-export – Mcmillin

Answer 2

Windows: TortoiseHG Hg-Git extension

Hg-Git can be used to convert a Mercurial repository to Git. You can use a local repository or a remote repository accessed via SSH, HTTP or HTTPS.

Example of local repositories conversion.

1. Install Hg-Git.

   • On Windows, TortoiseHg comes with Hg-Git, though you need to enable it via the setting tool (in extensions section)

     or manually in ~/mercurial.ini

     [extensions]
     hggit =
     

2. Use the following commands to convert the repository:

   $ mkdir git-repo; cd git-repo; git init; cd ..
   $ cd hg-repo
   $ hg bookmarks hg
   $ hg push ../git-repo
   

The hg bookmark is necessary to prevent problems as otherwise hg-git pushes to the currently checked out branch confusing Git. This will create a branch named hg in the Git repository. To get the changes in master use the following commands (only necessary in the first run, later just use git merge or rebase):

$ cd git-repo
$ git checkout -b master hg

Campbellite

I've found git-hg to be quite buggy, but this worked like a charm, and didn't require any additional downloads which is nice. – Regurgitate

I wanted a folder, not the entire repo. – Bedivere

github now has a tool that supports this directly from github, see #16038287 – Asymmetric

@SimoneCarletti Take a look at this question. It should help you to export a file/folder and its history in a temporary repository. Then you can use any of the provided solutions to convert the temporary Mercurial repository to Git. – Campbellite

Answer 3

You can (from Mercurial side):

• using Convert extension with --filemap option convert part of original repo into smaller with only needed files|directories
• with hg-git extension push stripped repo to Git

or (instead of hg-git), using Mercurial bridge in Git, clone|pull repository from Git

Salverform

Answer 4

Gitify

Seems as a more modern and easy to use alternative to perform the conversion https://github.com/buchuki/gitifyhg

pip install gitifyhg
git clone gitifyhg::<hgrepoaddress>
# done, you have a git repo with the entire history of the hg one

Hellespont

I didn't want to convert an entire repo, just a folder. – Bedivere

Awesome! Beware of unicode error though github.com/buchuki/gitifyhg/pull/98 – Babysitter

Note - gitifyhg is currently badly out of date with the latest Mercurial versions. – Salamander

Answer 5

Convert a Mercurial repository to Git on Windows 10

If no problem with encoding - use TortoiseHG Hg-Git extension

md new-repo && cd new-repo
git init --bare .git
cd ..\old-mercurial-repo
hg bookmark -r default master
hg push ..\new-repo
cd ..\new-repo
git config --bool core.bare false

If something wrong with encoding - use fast-export

Install Bash

Open PowerShell as Administrator and run:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

Install Ubuntu 16.04 LTS from Microsoft Store

Open Bash and run

install mercurial

sudo -s
apt-get update
apt install mercurial

get fast-export v180317 (at the moment versions after 180317 does not work correctly)

cd /mnt/c/path_to_work_folder
git clone https://github.com/frej/fast-export.git
cd fast-export
git checkout tags/v180317
cd ..

convert repository

git init new-repo && cd new-repo
git config core.ignoreCase false && git config core.quotepath off
../fast-export/hg-fast-export.sh -r ../path_to_mercurial_repo/ --fe cp1251
git checkout master

encoding options:

• -f encoding, like -f cp1251
• --fe file name encoding like --fe cp1251

Droshky

Answer 6

hg-git-fast-import

https://github.com/kilork/hg-git-fast-import

Another utility with the following features:

1. Import of single and multiple Mercurial repositories to Git repository.
2. Import of new revisions from previously imported Mercurial repositories to Git repository.
3. Tags.
4. Closed branches.
5. Verification of the end result with diff.

You may download binary for you platform and put somewhere in path or install with cargo (require rust to be installed):

cargo install hg-git-fast-import

Then usage is like this:

hg-git-fast-import single /path/to/source_hg /path/to/target_git

It does not need Python and Mercurial to be installed. Advanced configuration allows to replace authors or branches, make branches prefixed and more.

Thirzia

a good tool, but it seems to be neglected these days and does not handle much of what you might find in the .hg/requires file in recent mercurial versions – Deathly

Answer 7

If you're using github.com, they appear to have an import feature that lets you simply type in the URL of your hg project.

First create a new repository and then on the new repository's landing page scroll to the bottom and click the "Import code" button.

Then type the URL of your previous repository and hit "Begin import".

Then GitHub takes care of the rest!

Note that GitHub will ask you for your credentials for the old repository if it needs them.

Ooh! I found the official guide

Atelectasis

Answer 8

On Windows can be a bit tricky. After enabling the right plugins in mercurial( hggit), the TortoiseHG can also be used.

1. Clone mercurial repo
2. Clone git repo
3. Enable console : Enabling console

4. Using the console :

   % hg bookmarks hg

   % hg push <relative path to>/<git-repo>

Spevek