How to convert Mercurial repository to Git

With Mercurial losing the DVCS race to Git, I had a bunch of Hg repositories that I needed to convert to Git. I did that using the hg-git extension to Mercurial like this:

• Get the hg-git Mercurial extension by grabbing its latest source:

$ hg clone ssh://hg@bitbucket.org/durin42/hg-git

hg-git is available through PyPI, but I had problems when I used it. hg-git is also available on a Github mirror. However, that mirror has not been updated since 2016 and I ran into problems when I used the tool.

• Add the following lines to your .hgrc:

[extensions]
hggit = /path/to/hg-git/hggit
hgext.bookmarks =

• Install the dulwich Python Git library, which is used by hg-git:

$ pip install -U --user dulwich

• Create a bare Git repository to populate from your Mercurial repository:

$ git init --bare foobar_git_bare

• In our Mercurial repository, we add a hg bookmark at the top:

$ hg bookmarks hg

• To convert from Mercurial to Git, just push to the Git repository:

$ hg push /path/to/foobar_git_bare

• Now our bare Git repository is ready to be cloned to a general Git repository:

$ git clone foobar_git_bare foobar_git

You can change to the foobar_git repository and view all your commits and branches from the old Mercurial repository. This Git repository is now ready for action.

• If you want to push the new Git repository to Github, then create a repository on Github, delete the existing origin remote and push it:

$ git remote remove origin
$ git remote add origin git@github.com:joe/foobar.git
$ git push --set-upstream origin master

Tried with: Mercurial 4.5.3 and Git 2.17.1