I had an interview for which I created a GIT repo, but I wanted to import it into my personal monolyth SVN repo. After some Googling I found some examples, and this was the simplest solution. I decided to re-write from the original it in hopes that it’ll be more discoverable.

Intro

I’ll be doing everything on Windows and using spaces in paths, because that’s trickier, and to show that these things are not evil ;). Obviously, all these work on Unix systems as well, just convert the paths to use forward slashes and ignore the drive letters.

Initial state

• GIT repository with a project on a branch
  (simple Gradle project shown, with 3 commits that created it)

   + src
       + main
           + java
               - Test.java
   - build.gradle
   - README.md
  

   main: A --- B --- C
  

• SVN repository with projects in subfolders
  (I have 4 projects in 2 groups, with 6 commits that created these)

   + project group 1
        + project 1
        + project 2
   + project group 2
        + project 3
        + project 4
  

   svn: pg1 --- p1 --- p2 --- pg2 --- p3 --- p4
  

Goal

To grab the GIT repository contents into project group 2/project 5 subfolder of the SVN repository.

+ project group 1
     + project 1
     + project 2
+ project group 2
     + project 3
     + project 4
     + project 5
        + src
            + main
                + java
                    - Test.java
        - build.gradle
        - README.md

svn: pg1 --- p1 --- p2 --- pg2 --- p3 --- p4 --- A --- B --- C

Set-up

I’ll be using local repositories to do everything; meaning there’s no network requests going on. It should be easy to generalize this to remote repositories.

The GIT repository is located in: P:\temp\git repo

git init "git repo"
cd "git repo"
echo "Test repo" > README.md
git add --all && git commit --message "Init repo"
echo "apply plugin: java" > build.gradle
git add --all && git commit --message "Init project"
mkdir src\main\java
echo "public class Test { public static void main(String... args) { System.out.println(""Hello""); } }" > src\main\java\Test.java
git add --all && git commit --message "Add code"

The SVN repository is located in: P:\temp\svn repo (Note: original repository, not the checked-out files)

svnadmin create "svn repo"
svn mkdir "file://P:/temp/svn repo/project group 1" -m "add project group 1"
svn mkdir "file://P:/temp/svn repo/project group 1/project 1" -m "add project 1"
svn mkdir "file://P:/temp/svn repo/project group 1/project 2" -m "add project 2"
svn mkdir "file://P:/temp/svn repo/project group 2" -m "add project group 2"
svn mkdir "file://P:/temp/svn repo/project group 2/project 3" -m "add project 3"
svn mkdir "file://P:/temp/svn repo/project group 2/project 4" -m "add project 4"
svn checkout "file://P:/temp/svn repo" svn

Steps

• Prepare folder (svn mkdir)
• Check out SVN via git (git svn clone)
• Link GIT (git remote add)
• Link commits (git rebase)
• Send to SVN (git merge --ff-only & git svn dcommit)

Create hosting folder in SVN repository

A folder needs to be created to host the project in SVN. This is required to be able to put the branch from GIT repo into a subfolder.

svn mkdir "svn://localhost:1234/project group 2/project 5" -m "prepare project 5"

at this point we’ve added an extra commit to SVN. It would be nice to skip this from the steps, but didn’t find a way yet.

root
    + ...
    + project group 2
         + project 5

svn: pg1 --- p1 --- p2 --- pg2 --- p3 --- p4 --- prep

Prepare bridge repo from SVN

We’ll clone the actual project subfolder from the SVN repo, this is why it was required to exist beforehand.

git svn clone "svn://localhost:1234/project group 2/project 5" "svn via git"

Link up the bridge repo with GIT

cd "svn via git"
git remote add bridge "P:\temp\git repo"
git fetch bridge

main: pg1 --- p1 --- p2 --- pg2 --- p3 --- p4 --- prep
bridge/main: A --- B --- C

Prepare commits to be put on top of the SVN repo

Create working copy of the GIT repo (bridge/main) and put its history (import) on top of the SVN folder’s history (main).

git checkout -b import bridge/main
git rebase -i main

main: pg1 --- p1 --- p2 --- pg2 --- p3 --- p4 --- prep
import: A --- B --- C
bridge/main: A --- B --- C

main: pg1 --- p1 --- p2 --- pg2 --- p3 --- p4 --- prep
                                                       \
import:                                                  A' --- B' --- C'
bridge/main: A --- B --- C

Finalize the process

git checkout main
git merge --ff-only import

main: pg1 --- p1 --- p2 --- pg2 --- p3 --- p4 --- prep --- A' --- B' --- C'
                                                       \
import:                                                  A' --- B' --- C'
bridge/main: A --- B --- C

After checking that everything is correct git log, gitk and the like push the changes to the SVN repo via git svn dcommit.

References

• StackOverflow question with tricky answers
• Original idea and credit
• svn mkdir
• git svn