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How to move your active branch from GitLab to GitHub?

Hello. We need a couple simple steps. We will use git remote and git rebase. We decided to move only active (in development / QA) branches. There is no need to move every branch since we don't need them anymore.

Prerequisite​

You need to have github repo cloned locally on ~/dev/powr and the easiest way is to have powr-cli installed:

  • If you have fresh macOS with no brew, nvm, wget installed on your system then run:
git clone https://gitlab.com/powr/powr-cli.git ~/dev/cli && cd ~/dev/cli && make install
  • if you already have brew, nvm, wget installed and updated to latest versions with brew update then run:
git clone https://gitlab.com/powr/powr-cli.git ~/dev/cli && cd ~/dev/cli && make

Now that you ready to move your branch on GitHub repo please follow the steps below.

1. Goto your GitLab project directory and open terminal.​

Or type this in the opened terminal window:

source ~/.zshrc; d powr

2. Copy the name of the branch you want to move​

Then type in terminal

export NAME_OF_YOUR_BRANCH=<replace-me-w-name-of-ur-branch>

please replace <replace-me-w-name-of-ur-branch> (including brackets) with the one in your buffer.

  • If you need fast solution then do first two steps and then just copy and paste this into your terminal:
git checkout ${NAME_OF_YOUR_BRANCH} \
&& git remote add github https://github.com/powrful/powr \
&& git push github ${NAME_OF_YOUR_BRANCH} \
&& cd ~/dev/powr/ \
&& git checkout main \
&& git pull \
&& git checkout ${NAME_OF_YOUR_BRANCH}

and only then proceed to step the last step #9.

  • If you want understand what you are doing then ignore previous command and follow step by step.

3. Now checkout to the branch you want to move to GitHub.​

git checkout ${NAME_OF_YOUR_BRANCH}

Just copy and paste this line in the opened terminal window.

4. Add new remote which will point at GitHub.​

git remote add github https://github.com/powrful/powr

5. Make sure that remote has been added.​

Simply run:

git remote -v

in your terminal. Output should look similar to this:

$> git remote -v
github  https://github.com/powrful/powr.git (fetch)
github  https://github.com/powrful/powr.git (push)
origin  https://gitlab.com/powr/powr.git (fetch)
origin  https://gitlab.com/powr/powr.git (push)

6. Push your branch to github.​

git push github ${NAME_OF_YOUR_BRANCH}

If successful, you should see something like this:

To github.com:powrful/powr.git
[new branch]            <branchName> -> <branchName>

7. Make sure that the main branch on github is up to date!​

To do that run this:

cd ~/dev/powr/ && git checkout main && git pull

Now after we uploaded a branch to GitHub and pulled last commits we need to rebase it to GitHub's main branch.

8. Checkout to GitHub's newly added branch​

cd ~/dev/powr/ && git checkout ${NAME_OF_YOUR_BRANCH}

9. Now just rebase it to main with:​

git rebase main

You could have some merge conflicts during this stage — resolve them all and you're all set, your branch is moved to github and rebased with it's main branch, you have working powr-cli and your github repo is located at ~/dev/powr/. Please do not merge your branches to main or staging branches on github, until notify from payback that it's safe to merge your branches. Now you could run d powr to go to powr github repo in CLI and d cli to go to powr-cli.