Importing a Subversion repository

You can import a repository from Subversion by converting the repository to Git, then pushing the Git repository to GitHub.

In this article

Prerequisites

To follow these steps, you must use a macOS or Linux system and have the following tools installed:

Importing a Subversion repository

  1. Create a new repository on GitHub. To avoid errors, do not initialize the new repository with README, license, or gitignore files. You can add these files after your project has been pushed to GitHub. For more information, see "Creating a new repository."

  2. To confirm that Git is installed on your machine, run git --version.

    The output should be similar to git version 2.40.0.

  3. To confirm that git svn is available on your machine, run git svn --version.

    The output should be similar to git-svn version 2.40.0 (svn 1.14.2).

    If you can run git successfully but encounter an error when running git svn, you may need to install git svn separately. We recommend using Homebrew or the Ubuntu package registry, which include git-svn packages.

  4. To confirm that Git LFS is installed on your machine, run git lfs --version.

    The output should be similar to git-lfs/3.1.4 (GitHub; darwin arm64; go 1.18.1).

  5. Check out your Subversion repository.

    For example, to check out the Logisim open source project from Sourceforge, run svn checkout https://svn.code.sf.net/p/circuit/code/trunk.

  6. Move into the directory for your Subversion repository.

  7. To get a list of authors in your Subversion project and store the list in authors.txt, run the following script:

    Shell
    svn log -q | grep -e '^r' | awk 'BEGIN { FS = "|" } ; { print $2" = "$2 }' | sed 's/^[ \t]*//' | sort | uniq > authors.txt

  8. Update your authors.txt file, mapping the author name used in the Subversion repository to the name you want to use in your Git repository, with the following format:

    octocat = The Octocat <octocat@github.com>

  9. To convert your Subversion repository to a Git repository, use git svn.

    • If your Subversion repository has a standard format, with “trunk”, “branches”, and “tags” folders, run git svn clone -s URL PATH/TO/DESTINATION --authors-file PATH/TO/AUTHORS.TXT, replacing URL with the URL of the Subversion repository, PATH/TO/DESTINATION with the path to the directory you want to clone the repository into, and PATH/TO/AUTHORS.TXT with the path to your authors.txt file.

      For example, to clone the Logisim project from Sourceforge into a directory called logisim, run git svn clone -s https://svn.code.sf.net/p/circuit/code logisim --authors-file path/to/authors.txt.

    • If your Subversion repository is non-standard, you can customize git svn to handle your repository. For more information, see git-svn in the Git documentation.

  10. Git will check out each SVN revision and turn the revision into a Git commit. If your repository has many files or a lot of history, this process will take a long time.

    For large repositories, the command may freeze. If so, you can begin where you ended by terminating the command with Ctrl+C, moving to your new directory, and then running git svn fetch.

  11. Move into the directory for the newly-created Git repository.

  12. To add your GitHub repository as a remote, run git remote add origin URL, replacing URL with the URL for the GitHub repository you created earlier, such as https://github.com/octocat/example-repository.git.

  13. To push the repository to GitHub, run git push --mirror origin.

    If your repository contains any files that are larger than GitHub's file size limit, your push may fail. Move the large files to Git LFS by running git lfs import, then try again.

Further reading