Gogs migration to gitea - part 1

For a longer time now, I’m using gogs to host my git code. However, since beginning of this year, there are some problems. Mostly, that I can’t update anymore to the next versions of gogs (+0.12.1). Besides this, are there some features that I really want to use. These feature has been requested, but I heard, that the core developers isn’t supposedly a nice guy¹ and does not implement them. Long story short: A fork was created: gitea.

In this post, I try to figure out if a migration is possible or not. The fork was some time ago and there were change made, that break the migration: Meaning at some point it is not possible to switch anymore. This point was fork release 0.9.146 for gogs.

Here is the catch, I’m using the version 0.12 at the moment. So let’s hope that the migration is working. Main problem is that I need to start with gitea in version 1.0 and slow migrated to the latest version. However, it might be some trouble because the database schema diverting quite a bit.

First is to reproduce my production state on my laptop locally. I replace the gogs docker image with the gitea image and try to see what’s happening. On the website from gitea, a docker-compose example is presented that I’m using for this.

docker-compose stop gogs

Rsync the data down to the example docker-compose file of gitea. Next is to rename the given databases to the right version. gogs.db becomes gitea.db.

gogs-data > $ mv gogs/ gitea

I forgot to upgrade the path of the log file and run into follow error:

gitea  | panic: mkdir /app/gogs: permission denied                                                                                                
gitea  |                                                                                                                                          
gitea  | goroutine 1 [running]:                                                                                                                   
gitea  | panic(0x55db51367260, 0xc4203a80f0)                                                                                                      
gitea  |        /usr/lib/go/src/runtime/panic.go:500 +0x1a5                                                                                       
gitea  | code.gitea.io/gitea/modules/setting.newLogService()                                                                                      
gitea  |        /srv/app/src/code.gitea.io/gitea/modules/setting/setting.go:794 +0xdda                                                           
gitea  | code.gitea.io/gitea/modules/setting.NewServices()                                                                                        
gitea  |        /srv/app/src/code.gitea.io/gitea/modules/setting/setting.go:943 +0x1b                                                             
gitea  | code.gitea.io/gitea/routers.NewServices()                                                                                                
gitea  |        /srv/app/src/code.gitea.io/gitea/routers/init.go:37 +0x16                                                                         
gitea  | code.gitea.io/gitea/routers.GlobalInit()                                                                                                 
gitea  |        /srv/app/src/code.gitea.io/gitea/routers/init.go:47 +0x158                                                                        
gitea  | code.gitea.io/gitea/cmd.runWeb(0xc4202eb900, 0x0, 0xc4202eb900)                                                                          
gitea  |        /srv/app/src/code.gitea.io/gitea/cmd/web.go:158 +0xa7                                                                             
gitea  | code.gitea.io/gitea/vendor/github.com/urfave/cli.HandleAction(0x55db513819e0, 0x55db5147be68, 0xc4202eb900, 0xc4201add00, 0x0)           
gitea  |        /srv/app/src/code.gitea.io/gitea/vendor/github.com/urfave/cli/app.go:471 +0xbb                                                    
gitea  | code.gitea.io/gitea/vendor/github.com/urfave/cli.Command.Run(0x55db50e4ee34, 0x3, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x55db50e703e1, 0x16, 0x0, ...
)                                                                                                                                                 
gitea  |        /srv/app/src/code.gitea.io/gitea/vendor/github.com/urfave/cli/command.go:191 +0xcc9                                               
gitea  | code.gitea.io/gitea/vendor/github.com/urfave/cli.(*App).Run(0xc420377040, 0xc42000c140, 0x2, 0x2, 0x0, 0x0)                              
gitea  |        /srv/app/src/code.gitea.io/gitea/vendor/github.com/urfave/cli/app.go:241 +0x6a5                                                   
gitea  | main.main()                                                                                                                              
gitea  |        /srv/app/src/code.gitea.io/gitea/main.go:42 +0x356  

When evertyings was done proper, this should look like this:

docker-compose up
[+] Running 1/0
 ⠿ Container gitea  Created                                                                                                                  0.0s
Attaching to gitea
gitea  | Dec 29 21:22:29 syslogd started: BusyBox v1.24.2
gitea  | Dec 29 20:22:29 sshd[16]: Server listening on :: port 22.
gitea  | Dec 29 20:22:29 sshd[16]: Server listening on 0.0.0.0 port 22.
gitea  | 2021/12/29 21:22:29 [T] Custom path: /data/gitea
gitea  | 2021/12/29 21:22:29 [T] Log path: /app/gitea/log
gitea  | 2021/12/29 21:22:29 [I] Gitea v6aacf4d2
gitea  | 2021/12/29 21:22:29 [I] Log Mode: File(Info)
gitea  | 2021/12/29 21:22:29 [I] Cache Service Enabled
gitea  | 2021/12/29 21:22:29 [I] Session Service Enabled
gitea  | 2021/12/29 21:22:38 [I] Git Version: 2.8.3
gitea  | 2021/12/29 21:22:38 [I] SQLite3 Supported
gitea  | 2021/12/29 21:22:38 [I] Run Mode: Production
gitea  | 2021/12/29 21:22:39 [I] Listen: http://0.0.0.0:3000

Now you should be able to run the webserver. I’ve tried to log in, however, the release databases schema seems invalided to the running version. Which makes sense, there have been some upgraded happening between these versions.

Maybe the database was left in an inconsistent state after I’ve tried to upgrade to 0.12.1 earlier this year. That makes the hole things very messy now.

I could try to make sense of the database’s schema and see what have changed, or I start anew. Okay, let’s check the database thing first. What version do we have? We can use .header and .colume for some better formated output:

sqlite3 gogs.db
.header on
.mode column
 SELECT * FROM version;
id  version
--  -------
1   19     

Okay, when we look at gitea, we have what version? 170? Fuck, but that’s for the latest version. When we jump back to version 1.0.2, we see that the version is 4 and the migration scrips are executing to 13 or 14.

However, there is about of different news to this: that is the following:

Hi there, thank you for using Gogs for so long! However, Gogs has stopped supporting auto-migration from your previously installed version. But the good news is, it’s very easy to fix this problem! You can migrate your older database using a previous release, then you can upgrade to the newest version.

Yacks… Meaning that we need to understand how the codes does perform the migrations? Sight. That’s going to be a hack.

At this point we can do two things: Revert the changes of the databases to a state in which the migration script can handle the migration or setup new and populate the new gitea with the old data. This is it for now!

Best regards,
akendo