Fossil

Beginning with Fossil version 2.9, can mirror a Fossil-based project on GitHub by following these steps:

1. Create an account on GitHub if you do not have one already. Log into that account.

2. Create a new project. GitHub will ask you if you want to prepopulate your project with various things like a README file. Answer "no" to everything. You want a completely blank project. GitHub will then supply you with a URL for your project that will look something like this:

   https://github.com/username/project.git

3. Back on your workstation, move to a checkout for your project and type:

   fossil git export GITREPO --autopush https://username:password@github.com/username/project.git

   In place of GITREPO above, put in some directory name that is not part of your source tree. The directory need not exist - Fossil will create it if necessary. This GITREPO directory will become a Git repository that holds a translation of your Fossil repository.

   The --autopush option tells Fossil that you want to push the Git translation up to GitHub every time it is updated. Note that you will need to augment the URL supplied by GitHub to insert your account username and password.

   You can also run the command above outside of any open checkout of your project by supplying the "-R repository" option.

4. Get some coffee. Depending on the size of your project, the command above can run for several minutes.

5. And you are done! Assuming everything worked, your project is now mirrored on GitHub.

6. Whenever you update your project, simply run this command to update the mirror:

   fossil git export

   When updating your project, you do not need to reenter the GITREPO or the --autopush. Fossil remembers those things. The initial mirroring operation probably took several minutes (or tens of minutes) but a typical update will happen in a second or less.

Notes:

• The "fossil git export" command creates subprocesses that run "git" commands. So you must have Git installed on your machine for any of this to work.

• The Git repository will have an extra unmanaged top-level directory named ".mirror_state" that contains one or more files. Those files are used to store the intermediate state of the translation so that subsequent invocations of "fossil git export" will know where you left of last time and what new content needs to be moved over into Git. Be careful not to mess with the .mirror_state directory or any of its contents. Do not manages those files. Do not edit or delete them.

• Only check-ins and simple tags are translated to Git. Git does not support wiki or tickets or unversioned content or any of the other features of Fossil that make it so convenient to use, so those other elements cannot be mirrored in Git.

• In Git, all tags must be unique. If your Fossil repository has the same tag on two or more check-ins, the tag will only be preserved on the chronologically newest check-in.

Example GitHub Mirrors

As of this writing (2019-03-16) the Fossil self-repository is mirrored on GitHub at:

https://github.com/drhsqlite/fossil-mirror

In addition, an experimental SQLite mirror is available:

https://github.com/drhsqlite/sqlite-mirror

The Fossil source repositories for both of these mirrors are at https://www2.fossil-scm.org/fossil and https://www2.sqlite.org/src, respectively. On that machine, there is a cron job that runs at 17 minutes after the hour, every hour that does:

/usr/bin/fossil sync -u -R /home/www/fossil/fossil.fossil
/usr/bin/fossil sync -R /home/www/fossil/sqlite.fossil
/usr/bin/fossil git export -R /home/www/fossil/fossil.fossil
/usr/bin/fossil git export -R /home/www/fossil/sqlite.fossil

The initial two "sync" commands pull in changes from the primary Fossil repositores for Fossil and SQLite. The last two lines export the changes to Git and push the results up to GitHub.