README.md

Bugzilla to Gitlab migration tool

This is bztogl, a tool to migrate bug reports from Bugzilla to Gitlab.

The GNOME project's source code is moving from git.gnome.org to gitlab.gnome.org, and our bugs from bugzilla.gnome.org are moving to Gitlab, too!

While Git repositories can be easily moved to Gitlab — just add a Git remote for gitlab.gnome.org and push all the refs —, bugs need to be moved by a different tool. This project, bztogl, provides that tool.

Installation

bztogl is a Python 3 script, and it requires the python-bugzilla and python-gitlab modules. You can set up a virtualenv (essentially a personal sandbox for Python modules) for these like this:

mkdir ~/src/virtualenvs
virtualenv ~/src/virtualenvs/bztogl
source ~/src/virtualenvs/bztogl/bin/activate
# at this point your shell prompt will change to something like "(bztogl) $_"
pip install python-bugzilla
pip install python-gitlab

What bztogl does

At a high level, bztogl needs to be able to do these:

• Connect to Bugzilla.
• Connect to Gitlab.
• Read bugs from Bugzilla, their attachments, etc.
• Write issues to Gitlab.

bztogl only deals with bugs that are open in Bugzilla. It will not look at bugs that are already closed. Here, by "bugs that are open" we mean bugs with status NEW, ASSIGNED, REOPENED, NEEDINFO, UNCONFIRMED.

Know what you are doing

Bugzilla and Gitlab have different ideas of how bug reports or issues are structured, so it is important to do a test run first, to check if the resulting issues in Gitlab look fine.

You do not want to do this in a production project. Do it in a test project instead.

How to do a test run

1. Create a personal project for testing
2. Get an API key
3. Run bztogl

Each of these steps is detailed below.

1. Create a personal project for testing

You need a personal project for testing, where bztogl can create new issues without affecting the main/public project. That is, you want this tool to create issues in your_username/projectname, instead of the public GNOME/projectname.

Create a temporary project in your Gitlab account. Alternatively, you can register an account in gitlab-test.gnome.org and create a project there.

2. Get an API key

bztogl needs to talk to the Gitlab API, and for this it needs an API key. You can consider bztogl to be an application that wants to talk to Gitlab.

If you are using gitlab-test.gnome.org, get an API key at https://gitlab-test.gnome.org/profile/personal_access_tokens — you can use "bztogl" for in the Name field of the application you want to register. Pick an expiration date in the future, and turn on the checkboxes for api and read_user, so that bztogl can actually modify your test project. Click on the "Create personal access token" button.

WRITE DOWN THE API TOKEN you get right after clicking that button. You will not be able to see it again if you navigate away from that web page! If you lose the token, you can create a new one by following the same steps.

3. Run bztogl

If you used the steps from the installation section, you will have a Python virtualenv with the necessary modules. Make sure you have the virtualenv activated with the activate command form that example.

Now you can run this:

./bztogl.py --token <your_api_token> --product myproject

You will get some output:

Connecting to https://gitlab-test.gnome.org/
Using target project 'username/myproject since --target-project was not provided
Connecting to bugzilla.gnome.org
WARNING: Bugzilla credentials were not provided, BZ bugs won't be closed and subscribers won't notice the migration
Querying for open bugs for the 'myproject' product

If everything works fine, bztogl will start importing bugs. This is a slow process.

The WARNING about Bugzilla credentials is completely fine; it indicates that the bugs in Bugzilla will not be modified, which is exactly what we want for a test run.

If you get an error, check the following:

• Do you have the correct API key? Did you enable the api and read_user checkboxes when creating the API key?

• Is the Bugzilla product name correct? It's what you pass to the --product option.

• Is the Gitlab project name correct? If it is different from Bugzilla's product name, you can use the --target-project=username/project option.