Svn to Git Migration

At my workplace ZDirect, we have a decade old SVN repository hosting about twenty projects and totalling about 13 000 commits. Recently, we’ve decided to switch over to using Git from SVN because of SVN slowly becoming antiquated and its various productivity slowdowns that are not seen in new version control systems.

Some immediate goals

• Speed up the time it takes to clone a repo
• Simple branching and conflict handling
• More code reviews

That last point about pull requests is actually a feature of the web-based software hosting system. We chose GitLab as our solution, but more on that will come in a later post.

Some long-term goals

• Move towards continuous integration
• Use advanced Git workflows

Since being the most comfortable with Git, I volunteered myself as the “Migration Lead”, where I coordinated both the technical side and the human side. There is an incredible amount of articles out on the web talking about how company X or average Joe Y moved their SVN codebase to Git. What has really helped me along the way so far is Atlassian’s Git articles and tutorials; outlining a standard workflow for the process really makes it trivial for anyone else to do the same.