Converting a Bazaar repository to Git —27 January 2015

Using fastimport/fastexport is a great way to migrate between version control systems. Git already comes with fastimport built in. As of Bazaar 2.6, at least on Mac OS X, this is not the case. The solution is not trivial, and the details are important.

To install the fastimport module, I used a virtualenv of Python 2.x. (I tried Python 3.x at first but that didn’t work out.)

Setup a virtualenv and dependencies

The simplest way to install fastimport is using pip. To avoid cluttering your system (or even just your user home directory, when using the --user option), it’s good to create a throw-away virtualenv.

There is just one caveat: if you already have bzr in your system, it won’t be aware of the fastimport library installed in the virtualenv. A simple and clean way to fix that is installing bzr too inside the virtualenv. This is easiest to do using Python 2.x (I tried with 2.7), it’s quite nightmarish using Python 3.x.

Create the virtualenv using Python 2.7:

virtualenv-2.7 --distribute venv

Activate the virtualenv:

. venv/bin/activate

Install Bazaar and fastimport:

pip install bzr fastimport

Migrate from Bazaar to Git

Create an empty Git repository, anywhere:

git init /tmp/gitrepo

Assuming a Bazaar standalone branch is in /tmp/bzrrepo:

bzr fast-export /tmp/bzrrepo | GIT_DIR=/tmp/gitrepo/.git git fast-import

Notice the /.git added to the repository path when setting GIT_DIR.

The step importing to Git doesn’t create the files in the working directory, it only updates the repository itself. To checkout the files:

cd /tmp/gitrepo
git checkout -f

And that’s it! Now you can get out of the virtualenv:

deactivate