Importing your Repositories from Github to your Gitlab Instance

Allgemein, Linux

Github is a great service and offers a free micro account for students, which includes five private repositories. Still this might not be enough private repositories for some of us, especially if you start a lot of side projects (which are hardly finished :-)) and want to keep your code and data organised, versioned and collaborative but non-public (because it is not finished yet :-)). For this and other reasons I am also running a private Gitlab instance, which basically offers the same features as Github and can be hosted on your private server.

I still use Github for some projects, which means that I continuously run out of private repositories there as only five are included in my plan. Now Gitlab (the private instance) offers a great feature, which allows one to hook the Github account into the Gitlab instance and import code hosted in private repositories at Github into your Gitlab instance, where no limits for private repositories apply. Obviously the repositories could also be transferred manually, but the import feature via the Web interface is very convenient.

Installing the oAuth feature for Github and other services is very simple and described here for Gihub and there in general. Read both documentations carefully, as using the wrong settings can lead to a serious security issues. After following the instructions carefully, the warning that oAuth needs to be configured kept popping up in the Gitlab dashboard:

To enable importing projects from GitHub, as administrator you need to configure OAuth integration.

The final hint was given in this SO post here. The official documentation failed to mention that the changes in the configuration file must be updated by reconfiguring Gitlab. The following list of steps should lead to success:

  1. Login into Github and open your account settings
  2. Select Applications on the left and chose the Developer Applications tab
  3. Register a new application by providing the name (e.g. Gitlab Access), a homepage (can be anything), a description (optional) and the callback URL (e.g. https://gitlab.example.org).
  4. Add the initial OmniAuth configuration as described in the official documentation.
  5. Provide the settings for Github.
  6. Save the file and execute the following two commands.
sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure
sudo gitlab-ctl restart

The first time you select “Import project from Github”, you will be redirected to the Github authentication page, where you need to grant permission for the Gitlab user to retrieve the repositories. After you imported the private repositories into Gitlab, you can delete them from Github and reclaim some free space.