How to migrate/convert from SVN to Mercurial (hg) on windows

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I'm looking for a tool to migrate a couple of SVN repositories to Mercurial, with history, labels and so on.

I'm using TortoiseHg (Windows x32), so ConvertExtensions are discarded. There's some info on how to do this process on a Linux box (hgsvn), but I don't have a Linux machine available.

Can I use those Python scripts on Windows? If so, what do I need to do it? Or, what other tools can I use to do this process?

Basically, how can I convert an SVN project to Mercurial?

9 Answers

I just had to tackle this problem myself. I have a windows XP machine with a separate windows server hosting VisualSVN Server.

I also have TortoiseHG installed as well as the CollabNet Subversion Command-Line Client.

<Enable Convert Extension w/ Tortoise Hg 2>

Many thanks to bgever for pointing out in the comments that with TortoiseHg 2.0, enabling the convert extension is easier than ever. As he says

With TortoiseHG 2.0 this has been made much simpler: Start the TortoiseHG Workbench from the Start menu. Select File --> Settings. Select Extensions from the list. Check the 'convert' checkbox and click OK. That's it! No need to try to generate the config file anymore and search it in the file system. – bgever Mar 11 at 7:56

</Enable Convert Extension w/ Tortoise Hg 2>

<Enable Convert Extension Manually>

To convert a repository from SVN to HG, I followed these steps:

1) Open C:\Program Files\TortoiseHg\Mercurial.ini

EDIT

FYI - Tortoise Hg has migrated this file to

  • XP or older - C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Mercurial.ini
  • Vista or later - C:\Users\USERNAME\Mercurial.ini

That file will be mostly empty and you'll just list what you'd like to override there. If that's what you have, simple add these two lines to the very end of the file:

[extensions]
convert =

2) Search for the line that begins with

[extensions]

3) Below it you'll see a list of keywords, commented out with a semicolon (;) on each line

4) Find the line that says

;convert =

and delete the semicolon so it reads

convert =

</Enable Convert Extension Manually>

5) Open the command prompt and navigate to the directory that you'd like the new hg folder created in (the process will create a new folder called yoursvnreponame-hg in the directory that the command prompt is open to).

6) Use this command

hg convert file:///y:/yoursvnreponame

I found that the convert tool can have problems with networked repositories, so I had to map a drive to it, but this worked just fine for me.

  1. startup svn server on localhost
  2. hg convert svn://localhost/your_repo
  3. done, because svn bindings needed only for file:// protocol

This is in the TortoiseHg FAQ:

How can I convert a subversion repository to Mercurial?

You must install svn-win32-1.4.6 command line tools, then add them to your path. Then you must enable the convert extension. At this point, you should be able to use the 'hg convert' command to do the conversion. Please direct problems/questions about the convert extension to the Mercurial mailing list or #mercurial on irc.freenode.net.

So it is apparently possible -- I'm using Linux so I haven't tried myself.

Using the convert extension of Mercurial:

  1. Enable convert extention; add convert= to the [extensions] section of .hgrc like this:

    [extensions]
    convert=

  2. Linux needs additional python bindings: sudo apt-get install python-subversion
  3. Execute hg convert command
    • See hg convert -h for help
    • Example: hg convert http://[svnserver]/[Project] --source-type svn [DestinationDir] (see note 2)
  4. Push to newly created Mercurial repository: hg push https://[mercurialserver]/[Project]

note: you can even repeat the hg convert command to include new changes made in the svn repository after the previous convert.

note 2: When hg convert doesn't work using http:// or svn:// you could first checkout the Subversion repository (or update an existing one) and convert using the local checkout; example: hg convert [DirectoryOfLocalCheckout] --source-type svn [DestinationDir]

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