Question

I’ve been doing all my work in Git and pushing to GitHub. I’ve been very happy with both the software and the site, and I have no wish to change my working practices at this point.

My PhD adviser is asking all students to keep their work in an SVN repository that’s hosted at the university. I’ve found tons of documentation and tutorials about to pull down an existing SVN repository into Git, but nothing about pushing a Git repository to a fresh SVN repository. I expect there must be some way to do this with a combination of git-svn and a fresh branch and rebasing and all those wonderful terms, but I’m a Git newbie and don’t feel confident with any of them.

I then want to just run a couple of commands to push commits to that SVN repository when I choose. I wish to keep using Git and just have the SVN repository mirror what’s in Git.

I’ll be the only person ever committing to SVN, if this makes any difference.

Answer 1

I needed this as well, and with the help of Bombe’s answer + some fiddling around, I got it working. Here’s the recipe:

Import Git -> Subversion

1. cd /path/to/git/localrepo 2. svn mkdir --parents protocol:///path/to/repo/PROJECT/trunk -m 'Importing git repo' 3. git svn init protocol:///path/to/repo/PROJECT -s 4. git svn fetch 5. git rebase origin/trunk 5.1.  git status 5.2.  git add (conflicted-files) 5.3.  git rebase --continue 5.4.  (repeat 5.1.) 6. git svn dcommit 

After #3 you’ll get a cryptic message like this:

Using higher level of URL: protocol:///path/to/repo/PROJECT => protocol:///path/to/repo

Just ignore that.

When you run #5, you might get conflicts. Resolve these by adding files with state ‘unmerged’ and resuming rebase. Eventually, you’ll be done; then sync back to the SVN repository, using dcommit. That’s all.

Keeping repositories in sync

You can now synchronise from SVN to Git, using the following commands:

git svn fetch git rebase trunk 

And to synchronise from Git to SVN, use:

git svn dcommit 

Final note

You might want to try this out on a local copy, before applying to a live repository. You can make a copy of your Git repository to a temporary place; simply use cp -r, as all data is in the repository itself. You can then set up a file-based testing repository, using:

svnadmin create /home/name/tmp/test-repo 

And check a working copy out, using:

svn co file:///home/name/tmp/test-repo svn-working-copy 

That’ll allow you to play around with things before making any lasting changes.

Addendum: If you mess up git svn init

If you accidentally run git svn init with the wrong URL, and you weren’t smart enough to take a backup of your work (don’t ask …), you can’t just run the same command again. You can however undo the changes by issuing:

rm -rf .git/svn edit .git/config 

And remove the section [svn-remote 'svn'] section.

You can then run git svn init anew.