Over the last couple of months, we have been exploring some of the features of Azure DevOps around Pipelines and Repos. I thought it would be interesting to see how the same type of setup and process might look using GitHub instead of Azure DevOps. I haven’t used GitHub other than for a basic repo before so I’m not sure how much of the Azure DevOps post will carry over, but we are going to find out. In this first post, we are going to import the repo we used in the Azure DevOps series from our Azure DevOps Repo.
Importing a Repo
To start in the project click the New button in the Repositories section of your GitHub dashboard.
On the next page click the Import a repository link.
The first thing the import process wants to know is the URL of our old repository. To get this we need to head over to our Azure DevOps Repo. Once in the Azure DevOps Repo click the Clone button.
When the dialog for clone shows you will see the URL, but before copying the URL hit the Generate Git Credentials button. This will create a username and password we will also need to enter when importing the repo at GitHub.
Here is the dialog after generating credentials.
Use the button next to the URL to copy URL and head back to GitHub and paste it into the URL box. Next, enter a name for the repo and click Begin import.
The following is the screen you will see next while GitHub works on the import. Since the repo we are importing from needs credentials it will fail after a couple of minutes and ask for a login and password. If you hit refresh it will prompt you immediately without having to wait.
Copy and paste the values we generated in Azure DevOps above into the Login and Password boxes and then click Submit.
The page will update when the process is complete. GitHub will also send you an email so don’t feel the need to keep the page open while the process is running.
GitHub Repo Cleanup
Now that our repo is in GitHub we can clean up some of the items that were specific to Azure DevOps. For the sample project, this would include the files that were used in/or defined our build pipeline. The following are the files that can be deleted.
- azure-pipelines.yml
- build.yml
Wrapping up
As you have seen the repo transition from Azure DevOps to GitHub is a simple process. I’m looking forward to exploring how GitHub handles some of the scenarios from the Azure DevOps series. I’m betting that GitHub has support for most of them especially since the introductions of Actions.
Also published on Medium.