🔥Writing Dozens of Tools to Migrate an Enterprise from BitBucket to GitHub

This blog series focuses on presenting complex DevOps projects as simple and approachable via plain language and lots of pictures. You can do it!

Hey all!

These blog normally zooms in on particular technologies or use cases, but today we’re going to zoom out. Way, way out. I was recently (well, 6 months ago), to migrate an enterprise from an internal Stash/BitBucket server to a GitHub Organization. Full stop, good luck!

That project is nearly complete. As part of gathering information, preparing the new GitHub tenant, and executing the migration, I’ve had the opportunity to write dozens of bespoke tools. These tools are intended to gather information, build reference files that downstream tools will use, or to directly update settings or copy code and other repos. They create PRs in GitHub, they update Jenkins pipelines, they read and set settings in Jenkins, GitHub, and BitBucket.

As a collection, they are what enables this very large project to move forward. Let’s talk about some of the tools I remember writing (there are surely more I don’t!) and what they do! 🚀

Tooling Note: I Build My Own

Note for folks reading — there are ocassionaly tools available on these platforms or in public that could gather this information for us. However, I am reticent to use external tooling — I don’t know perfectly how it works, I don’t trust it fully, and it’s often not as customizable as writing my own tools.

Therefore, I write my own tools whenever possible.

Who Are The Active Users?

The first question of most migrations is licensing. It takes a long time to purchase things, and can be expensive, so we want accurate counts for licenses. So, a simple question — Which users (and how many) are active in our projects on our internal BitBucket server?

We don’t want to buy too many licenses, and we are only first moving one division to GitHub. So we need to see how many users are “active”. That “active” is hard to define. Have they opened a PR? Commented on a PR? Reviewed a PR? Then they’re “active”. BitBucket doesn’t have an easy report for that, but I…