gh2gl

Mirror all your GitHub repositories to GitLab automatically — private stays private, public stays public.

PyPI Python License: MIT

Having all your code on a single platform is a risk. This tool clones every repository from your GitHub account and creates matching repositories on GitLab, preserving visibility exactly. Run it once for a full backup, run it again anytime to sync incrementally.

• Visibility-safe — private repos are never created as public; defaults to private when in doubt
• Idempotent — safe to re-run; existing GitLab repos receive incremental pushes, not duplicates
• Full mirror — clones all branches and tags via git clone --mirror
• Dry-run mode — preview every action before executing a single write
• Selective backup — filter by glob pattern (--filter "myproject-*")
• Works on Windows — handles read-only .git files; tested on Windows 10 / PowerShell
• Rich terminal output — progress bar and per-repo status table

• Python 3.11+
• git in your PATH
• SSH key registered on both GitHub and GitLab
• GitHub token with repo scope
• GitLab token with api scope

pip install gh2gl
gh2gl init
# Creates a github-backup/ folder in the current directory
cd github-backup
# Edit config.yaml — set github.username and gitlab.username
# Edit .env — set GITHUB_TOKEN and GITLAB_TOKEN
gh2gl --dry-run # preview — no changes made
gh2gl # run the backup

git clone git@github.com:paladini/backup-github-to-gitlab.git
cd backup-github-to-gitlab
pip install -e .

1. Go to Settings → Developer settings → Personal access tokens → Tokens (classic)
2. Click Generate new token (classic)
3. Select scope: repo (required to list private repositories)
4. Paste the token into .env as GITHUB_TOKEN

1. Go to User Settings → Access Tokens → Add new token
2. Select scope: api (required to create projects)
3. Paste the token into .env as GITLAB_TOKEN

After running gh2gl init, two files are created in the github-backup/ folder:

config.yaml:

github:
 username: your-github-username
gitlab:
 username: your-gitlab-username # can differ from GitHub
 url: https://gitlab.com # change only for self-hosted GitLab
backup:
 include_forks: false # include forked repositories? (default: false)
 include_archived: true # include archived repositories? (default: true)
 # temp_dir: ./tmp # temporary dir for clones — auto-cleaned after each repo

.env:

GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_...
GITLAB_TOKEN=glpat-...

Tokens are loaded at runtime and never logged. .env is in .gitignore.

Run all commands from inside the github-backup/ folder (or any folder with config.yaml and .env):

# Back up all personal repositories
gh2gl
# Preview what would happen — no writes
gh2gl --dry-run
# Back up only repos matching a pattern
gh2gl --filter "myproject-*"
# Include forks (skipped by default)
gh2gl --include-forks
# Verbose: show raw git output (useful for debugging SSH issues)
gh2gl --verbose
# Use a different config file
gh2gl --config /path/to/config.yaml

DRY RUN MODE — no changes will be made
 my-private-repo ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 3/10
Repository Status Details
my-private-repo ~ dry run would create as private
my-public-site ~ dry run would create as public
archived-experiment ~ dry run would create as private
10 dry run
[DRY RUN] No operations were executed.

Private repositories on GitHub are always created as private on GitLab. Visibility is derived exclusively from the GitHub API response — there is no code path that can promote a private repository to public. If visibility cannot be determined, the tool defaults to private and logs a warning.

SSH keys are used for all git operations. API tokens are read from environment variables (.env), never from the config file, and never written to logs.

• v1 — Full backup: clone + push via SSH, idempotent, dry-run, selective filter
• v2 — Auto-sync: GitLab pull mirror (Premium) or GitHub Actions push mirror
• v2 — Organization repos with explicit opt-in
• v3 — Wiki mirroring

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Please open an issue first to discuss what you'd like to change.

MIT — see LICENSE.