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Exporting migration data from .com

You can export migration data from an organization on .com by using the API to select repositories to migrate, then generating a migration archive that you can import into a Enterprise Server instance.

Preparing the source organization on

  1. Ensure that you have owner permissions on the source organization's repositories.

  2. Generate an access token with the repo and admin:org scopes on .com.

  3. To minimize downtime, make a list of repositories you want to export from the source instance. You can add multiple repositories to an export at once using a text file that lists the URL of each repository on a separate line.

Exporting the organization's repositories

Note

Fork relationships do not persist after a migration.

To export repository data from .com, use the Migrations API.

The Migrations API is currently in a preview period, which means that the endpoints and parameters may change in the future.

Generating a migration archive

Note

Locking a repository prevents all write access to the repository. You cannot associate new teams or collaborators with a locked repository.

If you're performing a trial run, you do not need to lock the repository. When you migrate data from a repository that's in use, strongly recommends locking the repository. For more information, see About ghe-migrator.

  1. Notify members of your organization that you'll be performing a migration. The export can take several minutes, depending on the number of repositories being exported. The full migration including import may take several hours so we recommend doing a trial run in order to determine how long the full process will take. For more information, see About ghe-migrator.

  2. Start a migration by sending a POST request to the migration endpoint. You'll need:

    • Your access token for authentication.

    • A list of the repositories you want to migrate:

      curl -H "Authorization: Bearer _ACCESS_TOKEN" \
      -X POST \
      -H "Accept: application/vnd.+json" \
      -d'{"lock_repositories":true,"repositories":["ORG_NAME/REPO_NAME", "ORG_NAME/REPO_NAME"]}' \
      https://api..com/orgs/ORG_NAME/migrations
      
    • If you want to lock the repositories before migrating them, make sure lock_repositories is set to true. This is highly recommended.

    • You can exclude file attachments by passing exclude_attachments: true to the endpoint. File attachments can be large and may needlessly bloat your final migration archive. The final archive size must be less than 20 GB.

    This request returns a unique id which represents your migration. You'll need it for subsequent calls to the Migrations API.

  3. Send a GET request to the migration status endpoint to fetch the status of a migration. You'll need:

    • Your access token for authentication.

    • The unique id of the migration:

      curl -H "Authorization: Bearer _ACCESS_TOKEN" \
      -H "Accept: application/vnd.+json" \
      https://api..com/orgs/ORG_NAME/migrations/ID
      

    A migration can be in one of the following states:

    • pending, which means the migration hasn't started yet.
    • exporting, which means the migration is in progress.
    • exported, which means the migration finished successfully.
    • failed, which means the migration failed.
  4. After your migration has exported, download the migration archive by sending a GET request to the migration download endpoint. You'll need:

    • Your access token for authentication.

    • The unique id of the migration:

      curl -H "Authorization: Bearer _ACCESS_TOKEN" \
      -H "Accept: application/vnd.+json" \
      -L -o migration_archive.tar.gz \
      https://api..com/orgs/ORG_NAME/migrations/ID/archive
      
  5. The migration archive is automatically deleted after seven days. If you would prefer to delete it sooner, you can send a DELETE request to the migration archive delete endpoint. You'll need:

    • Your access token for authentication.

    • The unique id of the migration:

      curl -H "Authorization: Bearer _ACCESS_TOKEN" \
      -X DELETE \
      -H "Accept: application/vnd.+json" \
      https://api..com/orgs/ORG_NAME/migrations/ID/archive
      
  6. To prepare the archived migration data for import into a Enterprise Server instance, see Migrating data to Enterprise Server.