Back when distributed version control systems where new, there were a few options. Nowadays, most developers would assume you’re already talking about git. However, back in the day, Mercurial (hg) had much better tooling for windows than git. So I started moving everything from SVN and Source Safe to Mercurial.

Over the years I accumulated a few dozen Mercurial repositories and eventually starting using git like everyone else (thanks GitHub). But today I got an email from Bitbucket letting me know that they’re officially dropping support for Mercurial in June of 2020. It’s the right move, but I still had a number of Mercurial repositories in Bitbucket.

They’re encouraging everyone to migrate to git, but they don’t offer an automated way to that. Thankfully, it’s not too difficult.

Migrating hg to git

The process is rather straight forward. Create a new git repository, clone your hg repository, use hg-git to push your hg commits to git, and then push to a remote git repository.

# create a new git repository
git init --bare .\git-repo

# clone the hg repository
hg clone ssh:// hg-repo

cd hg-repo

# create a branch called hg
hg bookmarks hg

# push the hg repository to the local git repository
hg push ../git-repo

cd ..

cd git-repo

# push to a remote git repository
git remote add origin
git push --all origin

See Mark Heath’s How to Convert a Mercurial Repository to Git on Windows for more detailed information.

Migrating with scripts

So it’s simple, but what if you’re like me and have dozens of repositories to convert? That’s too much typing for me. I created a couple powershell scripts to do all of the heavy lifting:

So now I just needed to do the following for each repository:

  1. .\migrate.ps1 -BitbucketAccount username -Repository repo-name
  2. Rename the hg repository in Bitbucket
  3. Create a new git repository in Bitbucket
  4. .\push.ps1 -BitbucketAccount username -Repository git-repo-name

In case anyone else finds this useful, I’ve published the scripts to Bitbucket and GitHub.