Manually Mirroring Git Repos

If you're like me, you've had occasions where you need to replicate Git-managed projects from one Git service to another. If you're not like me, you use paid services that make such mundane tasks a matter of clicking a few buttons in a GUI. If, however, you need to copy projects from one repository-service to another and no one has paid to make a GUI buttton/config-page available to you, then you need to find other methods to get things done.

The following assumes that you have a git project hosted in one repository service (e.g, GitHub) that you wish to mirror to another repository service (e.g., BitBucket, AWS CodeCommit, etc). The basic workflow looks like the following:

Procedure Outline:

1. Login to a git-enabled host
2. Create a copy of your "source-of-truth" repository, depositing its contents to a staging-directory:
   

   git clone --mirror \
      <REPOSITORY_USER>@<REPOSITORY1.DNS.NAME>:<PROJECT_USER_OR_GROUP>/<PROJECT_NAME>.git \
      stage

3. Navigate into the staging-directory:
   

   cd stage

4. Set the push-destination to the copy-repository:
   

   git remote set-url --push origin \
      <REPOSITORY_USER>@<REPOSITORY2.DNS.NAME>:<PROJECT_USER_OR_GROUP>/<PROJECT_NAME>.git

5. Ensure the staging-directory's data is still up to date:
   

   git fetch -p origin

6. Push the copied source-repository's data to the copy-repository:
   

   git push --mirror

Procedure Outline:

Using an example configuration (the AMIgen6 project):

$ git clone --mirror git@github.com:ferricoxide/AMIgen6.git stage && \
  cd stage && \
  git remote set-url --push origin git@bitbucket.org:ferricoxide/amigen6-copy.git && \
  git fetch -p origin && \
  git push --mirror
Cloning into bare repository 'stage'...
remote: Counting objects: 789, done.
remote: Total 789 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 789
Receiving objects: 100% (789/789), 83.72 MiB | 979.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (409/409), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
Counting objects: 789, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (369/369), done.
Writing objects: 100% (789/789), 83.72 MiB | 693.00 KiB/s, done.
Total 789 (delta 409), reused 789 (delta 409)
To git@bitbucket.org:ferricoxide/amigen6-copy.git
 * [new branch]      ExtraRPMs -> ExtraRPMs
 * [new branch]      SELuser-fix -> SELuser-fix
 * [new branch]      master -> master
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/38/head -> refs/pull/38/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/39/head -> refs/pull/39/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/40/head -> refs/pull/40/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/41/head -> refs/pull/41/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/42/head -> refs/pull/42/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/43/head -> refs/pull/43/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/44/head -> refs/pull/44/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/52/head -> refs/pull/52/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/53/head -> refs/pull/53/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/54/head -> refs/pull/54/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/55/head -> refs/pull/55/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/56/head -> refs/pull/56/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/57/head -> refs/pull/57/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/62/head -> refs/pull/62/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/64/head -> refs/pull/64/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/65/head -> refs/pull/65/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/66/head -> refs/pull/66/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/68/head -> refs/pull/68/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/71/head -> refs/pull/71/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/73/head -> refs/pull/73/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/76/head -> refs/pull/76/head
 * [new branch]      refs/pull/77/head -> refs/pull/77/head

Updating (and Automating)

To keep your copy-repository's project in sync with your source-repository's project, periodically do:

cd stage && \
  git fetch -p origin && \
  git push --mirror

This can be accomplished by logging into a host and executing the steps manually or placing them into a cron job.