GitLab Group Migration

Introduced in GitLab 13.7.

WARNING: This feature is under construction and its API/Architecture might change in the future.

GitLab Group Migration is the evolution of Project and Group Import functionality. The goal is to have an easier way to the user migrate a whole Group, including Projects, from one GitLab instance to another.

Design decisions

Overview

The following architectural diagram illustrates how the Group Migration works with a set of ETL Pipelines leveraging from the current GitLab APIs.

ETL

ETL, for extract, transform and load, is a data integration process that combines data from multiple data sources into a single, consistent data store that is loaded into a data warehouse or other target system.

Using ETL architecture makes the code more explicit and easier to follow, test and extend. The idea is to have one ETL pipeline for each relation to be imported.

API

The current Project and Group Import are file based, so they require an export step to generate the file to be imported.

GitLab Group migration leverages on GitLab API to speed the migration.

And, because we're on the road to GraphQL, GitLab Group Migration will be contributing towards to expand the GraphQL API coverage, which benefits both GitLab and its users.

Namespace

The migration process starts with the creation of a BulkImport record to keep track of the migration. From there all the code related to the GitLab Group Migration can be found under the new BulkImports namespace in all the application layers.