Using Someone Else’s SVN Repository with Git

If you have a repository URL that looks like this:

http://code.yourmom.com/project/trunk/

Issue this command (note that you leave off trunk/):

git svn clone -s http://code.yourmom.com/project/ project

After it’s done, see how big it is:

du -hs project

And you’ll see something like this:

20M project/

If it’s particularly big, go into the folder and garbage collect:

cd project
git gc

From within the project folder, set your local repository to the trunk (it’s set to whatever branch had the last commit otherwise):

git reset --hard trunk

Create your own branch and get to work:

git co -b treys_changes

When you want to pull in the changes from the original author to stay up to date:

git svn rebase

If you’ve cloned this repo (after posting it to GitHub or elsewhere) and want to use it on another computer, you’ll have to use do more step in order to track the original SVN repo again:

git update-ref refs/remotes/trunk origin/master
git svn init -T trunk http://code.yourmom.com/project/

Sources

• Brian Rosner’s Using git with Django Screencast
• Pieter on #github
• WebKit wiki (via Pieter)