Till's blog

When I googled how to install private roles using ansible-galaxy, I found suggestions such as, "use git+https://github.com/..." or even better, "I am not sure what you're doing, but it works for me (since Ansible 2.2)".

So, since neither of these suggestions helped me and because I am unable to find documentation with obvious examples, here is how you achieve this.

Assuming you have your ssh key and configuration figured out, put this into requirements.yml:

---
- name: namespace.role
  src: [email protected]:my-organization/private-repository.git
  version: 1.0.0

This forces ansible-galaxy install requirements.yml to git-clone the role using your ssh key.

I've blogged about converting a Subversion repository to git a couple times. While it was a tedious process at first, I've made my peace with it and now cannot count the code repositories I have migrated successfully anymore. The migration usually works, except for when I deal with our old provider unfuddle.

For some reason, sometimes it didn't work right away and I had to re-run git svn clone a couple of times to get it right.

git svn clone

Here's a snippet to make it work for you:

$ git svn clone --authors-file=./authors.txt --no-metadata \
--prefix=svn/company_repositoryname/ \
--tags=tags \       
--trunk=trunk \
--branches=branches \
http://company.unfuddle.com/svn/company_repositoryname \
./new-git-repo

Make sure to replace the company and the company_repositoryname part in above scripts.

For some reason, I was never able to get prefix and all that completely right from the start. That is, until now — needless to say the above works. And for the sake of documenting and not re-learning each time (e.g. today, as a migrate another Subversion repository to git (Github :-)), here's my documentary blog post.

Tags and branches

Tags and branches are slightly different concepts in Subversion and git.

In Subversion, we usually ran pre-processing on tags before we deployed them (because doing this in a branch was a huge pita due to size of the repository and the overall joy of merging commits in Subversion. So in the end, a tag we created in Subversion, is not a tag in git because we modified the tag — which makes it a branch.

So as a follow up to my prior snippet to convert a repostitory, I've used this script to convert the branches it created to proper tags in git:

#!/bin/sh

branches=(`git branch -r`)

for branch in "${branches[@]}"
do
    case $branch in
    *tag*)
        tag=${branch//svn\/company_repositoryname\/tags\//}
        remote="remotes/${branch}"
        echo "$tag from $branch, remote: $remote"
        git checkout -b "tag-$tag" $remote && git tag -a $tag -m "SVN tag: $tag"
        ;;
    *)
        echo "Skipping: $branch"
    esac
done

Again, you will have to adjust company_repositoryname in this piece. :-)

Once the script completes, I verify the tags with git tag -l and delete the branches with git branch -D foo.

If all looks ok and the tests confirm this, I add an origin, push branches and also git push --tags.

Fin

That's all — happy migrating. Just in case: the code is BSD licensed, which means, you can do whatever you want with it.