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gitbackup - Backup your GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket repositories

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• gitbackup - Backup your GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket repositories
  • Introduction
  • Installing gitbackup
  • Using gitbackup
    • GitHub Specific oAuth App Flow
    • OAuth Scopes/Permissions required
      • Bitbucket
      • GitHub
      • GitLab
    • Security and credentials
    • Examples
      • Backing up your GitHub repositories
      • Backing up your GitLab repositories
      • GitHub Enterprise or custom GitLab installation
      • Backing up your Bitbucket repositories
      • Specifying a backup location
      • Cloning bare repositories
      • GitHub Migrations
  • Building

Introduction

gitbackup is a tool to backup your git repositories from GitHub (including GitHub enterprise), GitLab (including custom GitLab installations), or Bitbucket.

gitbackup currently has two operation modes:

• The first and original operating mode is to create clones of only your git repository. This is supported for Bitbucket, GitHub and Gitlab.
• The second operating mode is only available for GitHub where you can create a user migration (including orgs) which you get back as a .tar.gz file containing all the artefacts that GitHub supports via their Migration API.

If you are following along my Linux Journal article (published in 2017), please obtain the version of the source tagged with lj-0.1.

Installing gitbackup

Binary releases are available from the Releases page. Please download the binary corresponding to your OS and architecture and copy the binary somewhere in your $PATH. It is recommended to rename the binary to gitbackup or gitbackup.exe (on Windows).

If you are on MacOS, a community member has created a Homebrew formula.

Using gitbackup

gitbackup requires a GitHub API access token for backing up GitHub repositories, a GitLab personal access token for GitLab repositories, and a username and app password for Bitbucket repositories.

You can supply the tokens to gitbackup using GITHUB_TOKEN and GITLAB_TOKEN environment variables respectively, and the Bitbucket credentials with BITBUCKET_USERNAME and BITBUCKET_PASSWORD.

GitHub Specific oAuth App Flow

Starting with the 0.6 release, if you run gitbackup without specifying GITHUB_TOKEN, it will prompt you to complete a oAuth flow to grant the necessary access:

$ ./gitbackup -service github -github.repoType starred
Copy code: <some code>
then open: https://github.com/login/device

Once your authorize the app, gitbackup will retrieve the token, and also store it in your operating system's keychain/keyring (using the 99designs/keyring package - thanks!). Next time you run it, it will ask you for the keyring password and retrieve the token automatically.

OAuth Scopes/Permissions required

Bitbucket

For the App password, the following permissions are required:

• Account:Read
• Repositories:Read

GitHub

• repo: Reading repositories, including private repositories
• user and admin:org: Basically, this gives gitbackup a lot of permissions than you may be comfortable with. However, these are required for the user migration and org migration operations.

GitLab

• api: Grants complete read/write access to the API, including all groups and projects. For some reason, read_user and read_repository is not sufficient.

Security and credentials

When you provide the tokens via environment variables, they remain accessible in your shell history and via the processes' environment for the lifetime of the process. By default, SSH authentication is used to clone your repositories. If use-https-clone is specified, private repositories are cloned via https basic auth and the token provided will be stored in the repositories' .git/config.

Examples

Typing -help will display the command line options that gitbackup recognizes:

$ gitbackup -help
Usage of ./gitbackup:
  -backupdir string
        Backup directory
  -bare
        Clone bare repositories
  -githost.url string
        DNS of the custom Git host
  -github.createUserMigration
        Download user data
  -github.createUserMigrationRetry
        Retry creating the GitHub user migration if we get an error (default true)
  -github.createUserMigrationRetryMax int
        Number of retries to attempt for creating GitHub user migration (default 5)
  -github.listUserMigrations
        List available user migrations
  -github.namespaceWhitelist string
        Organizations/Users from where we should clone (separate each value by a comma: 'user1,org2')
  -github.repoType string
        Repo types to backup (all, owner, member, starred) (default "all")
  -github.waitForUserMigration
        Wait for migration to complete (default true)
  -gitlab.projectMembershipType string
        Project type to clone (all, owner, member, starred) (default "all")
  -gitlab.projectVisibility string
        Visibility level of Projects to clone (internal, public, private) (default "internal")
  -ignore-fork
        Ignore repositories which are forks
  -ignore-private
        Ignore private repositories/projects
  -service string
        Git Hosted Service Name (github/gitlab/bitbucket)
  -use-https-clone
        Use HTTPS for cloning instead of SSH

Backing up your GitHub repositories

To backup all your own GitHub repositories to the default backup directory ($HOME/.gitbackup/):

$ GITHUB_TOKEN=secret$token gitbackup -service github

To backup only the GitHub repositories which you are the "owner" of:

$ GITHUB_TOKEN=secret$token gitbackup -service github -github.repoType owner

To backup only the GitHub repositories which you are the "member" of:

$ GITHUB_TOKEN=secret$token gitbackup -service github -github.repoType member

Separately, to backup GitHub repositories you have starred:

$ GITHUB_TOKEN=secret$token gitbackup -service github -github.repoType starred

Additionally, to backup only the GitHub repositories under 'user1' and 'org3':

$ GITHUB_TOKEN=secret$token gitbackup -service github -github.namespaceWhitelist "user1,org3"

Backing up your GitLab repositories

To backup all projects you either own or are a member of which have their visibility set to "internal" on https://gitlab.com to the default backup directory ($HOME/.gitbackup/):

$ GITLAB_TOKEN=secret$token gitbackup -service gitlab

To backup only the GitLab projects (either you are an owner or member of) which are "public"

$ GITLAB_TOKEN=secret$token gitbackup -service gitlab -gitlab.projectVisibility public

To backup only the private repositories (either you are an owner or member of):

$ GITLAB_TOKEN=secret$token gitbackup -service gitlab -gitlab.projectVisibility private

To backup public repositories which you are an owner of:

$ GITLAB_TOKEN=secret$token gitbackup \
    -service gitlab \
    -gitlab.projectVisibility public \
    -gitlab.projectMembershipType owner

To backup public repositories which you are an member of:

$ GITLAB_TOKEN=secret$token gitbackup \
    -service gitlab \
    -gitlab.projectVisibility public \
    -gitlab.projectMembershipType member

To backup GitLub repositories you have starred:

$ GITLAB_TOKEN=secret$token gitbackup -service gitlab \
  -gitlab.projectMembershipType starred \
  -gitlab.projectVisibility public

GitHub Enterprise or custom GitLab installation

To specify a custom GitHub enterprise or GitLab location, specify the service as well as the the githost.url flag, like so

$ GITLAB_TOKEN=secret$token gitbackup -service gitlab -githost.url https://git.yourhost.com

Backing up your Bitbucket repositories

To backup all your Bitbucket repositories to the default backup directory ($HOME/.gitbackup/):

$ BITBUCKET_USERNAME=username BITBUCKET_PASSWORD=password gitbackup -service bitbucket

Specifying a backup location

To specify a custom backup directory, we can use the backupdir flag:

$ GITHUB_TOKEN=secret$token gitbackup -service github -backupdir /data/

This will create a github.com directory in /data and backup all your repositories there instead. Similarly, it will create a gitlab.com directory, if you are backing up repositories from gitlab, and a bitbucket.com directory if you are backing up from Bitbucket. If you have specified a Git Host URL, it will create a directory structure data/host-url/.

Cloning bare repositories

To clone bare repositories, we can use the bare flag:

$ GITHUB_TOKEN=secret$token gitbackup -service github -bare

This will create a directory structure like github.com/org/repo.git containing bare repositories.

GitHub Migrations

gitbackup starting from the 0.6 release includes support for downloading your user data/organization data as made available via the Migrations API. As of this release, you can create an user migration (including your owned organizations data) and download the migration artefact using the following command:

$ ./gitbackup -service github -github.createUserMigration -ignore-fork -github.repoType owner

2021/05/14 05:05:27 /home/runner/.gitbackup/github.com doesn't exist, creating it
2021/05/14 05:05:35 Creating a user migration for 129 repos
2021/05/14 05:05:46 Waiting for migration state to be exported: 0xc0002a6260
2021/05/14 05:06:48 Waiting for migration state to be exported: 0xc000290070
..
2021/05/14 05:33:44 Waiting for migration state to be exported: 0xc0001c2020

2021/05/14 05:34:46 Downloading file to: /home/runner/.gitbackup/github.com/user-migration-571089.tar.gz

2021/05/14 05:35:00 Creating a org migration (FedoraScientific) for 19 repos
2021/05/14 05:35:03 Waiting for migration state to be exported: 0xc000144050
..
2021/05/14 05:39:05 Downloading file to: /home/runner/.gitbackup/github.com/FedoraScientific-migration-571098.tar.gz
..
2021/05/14 05:46:16 Downloading file to: /home/runner/.gitbackup/github.com/practicalgo-migration-571103.tar.gz

You can then integrate this with your own scripting to push the data to S3 for example (See an example workflow via scheduled github actions here).

Building

If you have Go 1.21.x installed, you can clone the repository and:

$ go build

The built binary will be gitbackup.