Gitivity

A dumb utility to help you mirror your GitLab and GitHub contributions.

This tool exists for those people who regularly work on both and want to replicate their activity from one to the other. It is extremely basic, but will serve the purpose for most users. Right now it only supports GitHub and GitLab, on the public endpoints. If there's any interest I might add support for Enterprise versions, or other APIs (Bitbucket, etc).

This tool will attempt to replicate "activity" as defined by each service, in order to make charts match across services. This may not always be possible, so don't expect to see identical charts - but they should generally be pretty close. Please also keep in mind that their definitions of activity can change at any point, but I'll do my best to keep up!

Getting Started

You can install gitivity from either this repository, or from npm:

npm i -g gitivity
npm i -g whitfin/gitivity

Using gitivity from the CLI is simple, with you typically only needing mirror. For example, to export your GitLab activity into a new repository inside my-activity:

gitivity mirror gitlab glpat-_******************* my-gitlab-activity

You can then create a private GitHub repository and use it as a remote, which will mirror the activity to your profile. This tool will not configure remote repositories for you.

Discrete Steps

If you would prefer to do this as discrete steps, you can use the export and import commands directly. The mirror command is simply a convenient chain of these commands:

gitivity export <service> <token>
gitivity import <target>

Both of these commands work via stdio so you can pipe between them, or buffer to files as an interim. This allows you to inspect the exported activity before import:

gitivity export gitlab glpat-_******************* > export.jsonl
gitivity import my-gitlab-activity < export.jsonl

The main difference with this approach is that because the mirror command has context of the output repository, it can use the latest commit timestamp to enable incremental exports.

How It Works

The idea here is pretty simple. You first export your commit data from a service (e.g. GitLab) and then import it into a repository locally. For each exported commit, a new empty commit will be generated with a matching timestamp and author.

The message of the commit contains an identifier we can use to filter out duplicate commits on subsequent runs by scanning the Git log. This means that you can safely schedule this to run daily or weekly without fear of duplicates.

If you have a lot of commits, it will take a long time to run initially. Making a commit takes about 25ms (on my machine), so expect a few minutes if you're porting over thousands of commits. Subsequent runs of this tool will speed up as it will only create commits for newly exported commits.

Help & Issues

Although this is a tool primarily designed for my own use I'm happy to hear and consider feedback, even though I'll likely try to avoid getting too broad when it comes to things like new features. Feel free to file issues if you need help and/or have suggestions!