I needed to migrate a couple of repositories with lots of tags and branches to github, and Github’s instrucitons just weren’t cutting it:
Existing Git Repo?
cd existing_git_repo
git remote add origin [email protected]:[orgname]/[branchname].git
git push -u origin master
That’s great as long as all I care about is moving my master branch, but what I really wanted was just to make github have everything that my current origin did, whether or not I was tracking it. A quick cursory Google search didn’t find any instructions how to do this, so I had to figure it out the old fashioned way, by reading git help pages. The quickest and easiest way I could find to do this after creating the repo on github is:
git clone git@[originurl]:[orgname]/[reponame].git [local temp dir] --mirror
cd [local temp dir]
git remote add github [email protected]:[orgname]/[reponame].git
git push -f --mirror github
cd ..
rm -rf [local temp dir]
that’s it! At this point github should have everything that your original origin had, including everything in /refs. It won’t have any of your local branches, since you did everything from a clean checkout. You might also want to change where origin is pointing:
cd [dir where your repo is checked out]
git remote add oldOrigin git@[oldgitserver]:[orgname]/[reponame].git
git remote set-url origin [email protected]:[orgname]/[reponame].git
Of course, this same procedure should work for moving from any git server to any other git server too.