Git is Git. Wherever it’s hosted, the basics are the same. But the features and community around tools has driven me to make a change.
Starting Out
My first interactions with Git happened around 2010, when we decided to move away from Visual SourceSafe and Subversion and onto Git. At the time, some of the cloud services were either in their infancy or priced outside of what our small business could absorb. So we stood up a small Git server to act as our centralized repository.
The beauty of Git is that, well, everyone has a copy of the repository locally, so it’s a little easier to manage the backup and disaster recovery aspects of a centralized Git server. So the central server is pretty much a glorified file share.
To the Cloud!
Our acquisition opened up access to some new tools, including Bitbucket Cloud. We quickly moved our repositories to Bitbucket Cloud so that we could decommission our self-hosted server.
Personally, I started storing my projects in Bitbucket Cloud. Sure, I had a GitHub account. But I wasn’t ready for everything to be public, and Bitbucket Cloud offered unlimited private repos. At the time, I believe GitHub was charging for private repositories.
I also try to keep my home setup as close to work as possible in most cases. Why? Well, if I am working on a proof of concept that involves specific tools and their interaction with one another, it’s nice to have a sandbox that I can control. My home lab ecosystem has evolved based on the ecosystem at my job:
- Self-hosted Git / TeamCity
- Bitbucket Cloud / TeamCity
- Bitbucket Cloud / Azure DevOps
- Bitbucket Cloud / Azure DevOps / ArgoCD
To the Hub!
Even before I changed jobs, a move to GitHub was in the cards, both personally and professionally.
Personally, as a community, I cannot think of a more popular platform than GitHub for sharing and finding open/public code. My GitHub profile is, in a lot of ways, a portfolio of my work and contributions. As I have started to invest more time into open source projects, my portfolio has grown. Even some of my “throw away” projects are worth a little, if only as a reference for what to do and what not to do.
Professionally, GitHub has made a great many strides in its Enterprise offering. Microsoft’s acquisition only pushed to give GitHub access to some of the CI/CD Pipeline solutions that Azure DevOps has, coupled with the ease of use of GitHub. One of the projects on the horizon at my old company was to identify if GitHub and GitHub actions could be the standard for build and deploy moving forward.
With my move, we have a mix of ecosystem: GitHub + Azure DevOps Pipelines. I would like to think, long term, I could get to GitHub + GitHub Actions (at least at home), the interoperability of Azure DevOps Pipelines with Azure itself makes it hard to migrate completely. So, with a new professional ecosystem in front of me, I decided it was time to drop BitBucket Cloud and move to GitHub for everything.
Organize and Move
Moving the repos is, well, simple. Using GitHub’s Import functionality, I pointed at my old repositories, entered my BitBucket Cloud username and personal access token, and GitHub imported it.
This simplicity meant I had time to think about organization. At this point, I am using GitHub for two pretty specific types of projects:
- Storage for repositories, either public or private, that I use for my own portfolio or personal projects.
- Storage for repositories, all public, that I have published as true Open Source projects.
I wanted to separate the projects into different organizations, since the hope is the true Open Source projects could see contributions from others in the future. So before I started moving everything, I created a new GitHub organization. As I moved repositories from BitBucket Cloud, I put them in either my personal GitHub space or this new organization space, based on their classification above. I also created a new SonarCloud organization to link to the new GitHub organization.
All Moved In!
It really only took about an hour to move all of my repositories and re-configure any automation that I had to point to GitHub. I setup new scans in the new SonarCloud organization and re-pointed the actions correctly, and everything seems to be working just fine.
With all that done, I deleted my BitBucket Cloud workspaces. Sure, I’m still using Jira Cloud and Confluence Cloud, but I am at least down a cloud service. Additionally, since all of the projects that I am scanning with Sonar are public, I moved them to SonarCloud and deleted my personal instance of SonarQube. One less application running in the home lab.
Leave a Reply