This is a Python script I wrote to move my Bitbucket Mercurial repositories to Github as Git repositories.

Compared to the Frankenstein UI of Git, Mercurial has the perfect elegance and simplicity for personal projects. So I had been using Bitbucket to host all of my personal projects, numbering almost 100 for about a decade. When Bitbucket announced that they were shutting down Mercurial projects, I had no choice but to convert to Git and move my projects to Github.

Quickstart

This process has been broken into 2 steps, on purpose:

1. Create empty Git repositories on Github for each Bitbucket Hg repository:

$ ./bitbucket_hg_to_github.py --create_gh_repos <other args...>

2. Convert Bitbucket Hg repositories to Git and push them to Github:

$ ./bitbucket_hg_to_github.py --push_gh_repos <other args...>

Steps

These are the steps I followed:

• Make sure that hg and git can work with Bitbucket and Github respectively without asking for your credentials at the shell. To do this, you essentially create a SSH public-private key pair and add the public key to your account in Github and Bitbucket.

• Create an app password at Bitbucket as described here. You need to provide the Repositories - Read permission for this app password. Note down the app password that you created.

• Create an access token at Github as described here. You need to enable everything under the repo scope for this access token. Note down the access token that you created.

• Peruse my post on converting Hg repository to Git. Make sure you have all those packages installed and the conversion is working on a dummy Hg repo.

• Install the requests and pygithub packages, if you do not have them already:

$ python3 -m pip install --user requests pygithub

• Create empty Git repositories on Github for each Bitbucket Hg repository:

$ ./bitbucket_hg_to_github.py --create_gh_repos \
--bb_username <your-bitbucket-username> \
--bb_app_password <bitbucket-app-password> \
--gh_username <your-github-username> \
--gh_access_token <github-access-token>

• Convert Bitbucket Hg repositories to Git and push them to Github:

$ ./bitbucket_hg_to_github.py --push_gh_repos \
--bb_username <your-bitbucket-username> \
--bb_app_password <bitbucket-app-password> \
--gh_username <your-github-username> \
--gh_access_token <github-access-token>

Notes

• The script only moves a single repository. This enables you to test out the script before trying it on all your Bitbucket Hg repos. When you are ready to pull the trigger, add the --do_it option to the two commands.

• The Github repositories are created as private by default.

• A _PRIVATE suffix is added to the Hg repo when it is created on Github. Use the --git_suffix option to control this.

• The script creates and uses a tmp directory to place the Hg and Git repos it is working with. You can change this location using the --tmp_dir option.

Arguments

$ ./bitbucket_hg_to_github.py --help
usage: bitbucket_hg_to_github.py [-h] [--create_gh_repos] [--push_gh_repos]
                                 --bb_username BB_USERNAME --bb_app_password
                                 BB_APP_PASSWORD --gh_username GH_USERNAME
                                 --gh_access_token GH_ACCESS_TOKEN
                                 [--git_suffix GIT_SUFFIX] [--tmp_dir TMP_DIR]
                                 [--do_it]

Move Bitbucket Hg repositories to Github.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --create_gh_repos     Create Github repos for Bitbucket Hg repos (default:
                        False)
  --push_gh_repos       Push Bitbucket Hg repos to Github repos (default:
                        False)
  --bb_username BB_USERNAME
                        Bitbucket username (default: None)
  --bb_app_password BB_APP_PASSWORD
                        Bitbucket app password (default: None)
  --gh_username GH_USERNAME
                        Github username (default: None)
  --gh_access_token GH_ACCESS_TOKEN
                        Github access token (default: None)
  --git_suffix GIT_SUFFIX
                        Suffix for Git repo names (default: _PRIVATE)
  --tmp_dir TMP_DIR     Dir to use for repo work (default: tmp)
  --do_it               Use when you really want to convert all repos
                        (default: False)