What is Source Control?

Software development projects are based on teamwork with Git source control. Git is a version control system that stores code tracks and changes in real time and synchronises updates on local and cloud repositories. Source Control Management system lets you provide a running history, manage conflicts, and review changes so your team members can collaborate and share updates, document changes in their code, and upload new versions.

The version control system is categorised into:

  • Centralized
  • Distributed

Centralized System

In a centralized system, all team members connect to a central server to get the latest copy of the code and share the changes with others.

Distributed System

In a distributed system, every team member has a copy of the project with its history, and code changes on their local machine. So you can save snapshots of your project locally on your local machine. if the central server is offline, we can synchronise our work directly with others using the Git version control system.

Git is a version control system that allows developers to keep track of code changes. Git is popular because it's distributed, which means developers can commit changes without connecting to a central server. Also, developers use Git workflow to establish branching and merging on their applications and sample code. The version source control system records the changes made to our code over time in a special database called repository. In your repository, you can look at your project history and see who has made what changes when and why, and if you screw something up you can easily revert your project back to an earlier state.  

Without a version control system we'll have to constantly store copies of your entire project in various folders which is very slow and doesn't scale at all especially if multiple people have to work on the same project. With a version control system, we can track our project history, and collaborate on different projects together.

GitHub is a web-based version-control and collaboration platform for software developers and Engineers. It’s the largest Git-based control platform commonly used by Open-source communities. In the GitHub platform, members can follow and rate each other’s work, receive updates for specific projects, and communicate privately or publicly.

GitLab is a popular, open-source Git hosting solution used by different teams and enterprise Organizations. Most enterprise DevOps teams used GitLab because they could self-host their code on their infrastructure and configure DevOps CI/CD Pipelines directly on their GitLab workflow. With the recent and continuous improvements to the GitHub platform, you can now configure DevOps CI/CD Pipelines with GitHub Actions, host GitHub in your Infrastructure, and create unlimited private repositories.

GitHub vs GitLab

Feature GitHub GitLab
Issue Tracker GitHub issue tracker board lets you open pull request, raise issues on your source codes, and automatically close them when merged to another repo. The GitLab issue board tracker lets users align and link issues with Pull Requests that will be automatically closed
Integration Extended and built-in continuous integration in GitHub with a diverse marketplace. Built-in integration tools for continuous integrations and developments.
Platform Collaborative and development platform to store, and track repository and projects with other functionalities like issue management, bug tracking, GitHub Actions CI/CD, Releases notes. GitLab provides a web-based modern DevSecOps and DevOps development lifecycle management of projects.
Workflow Extended workflow with a main branch and feature branches with a Pull request (PRs) workflow against the feature or main branch. Workflow models with production, development environment, release branches, modern feature branches, and a standard merge requests (MRs) flow.
CI/CD Integration Automate your workflow from development to production with GitHub Actions. Automate and deliver your workflow, iterate faster with DevSecOps builds.
Code Search The advanced code search feature lets you search source code changes with the new advanced syntax and directly linking to the Code in-line changes. Activity search within project code and repository issues.

If you’ve resources and workloads in GitLab and you want to migrate them to GitHub, check out the steps below:

How to migrate from GitLab to GitHub

There are different ways to import your existing projects and repositories from GitLab to GitHub; we’ll explore the different methods in this article.

Migrate from GitLab to GitHub using the GitHub Repository Importer

  • To migrate your existing GitLab source codes and projects into GitHub. In your GitHub console, click the dropdown menu, and select Import repository.

  • In your GitLab repository, copy the URL of your application repository.

  • Enter your old repository clone URL from GitLab, select the owner, and enter the Repository name. Choose if you want the repository to be Public or Private.

  • Next, click on Begin Import. The process will start importing your repository from GitLab. Once completed, you’ll receive an email notification that the process has been completed.
  • In your GitHub dashboard, you can see that your repository is completed and ready to be used.

  • Next, click on the URL, and you’ll see that your GitLab repository is ready with all the source codes and packages.

Import GitLab repository using the Command Line

  • To import your existing Gitlab repository to GitHub, create a new one.

  • Next, clone your GitLab project with the bare clone command git clone -bare <gitlab_url>

  • Next, push your GitLab repository on your local machine to your newly created GitHub repository using the git push mirror command git push –mirror <github_url>. This will copy all your packages, source code, files, tags, and repository branches from GitLab into GitHub.

  • In your GitHub repository, you’ll see your GitLab project with all the source codes, packages, and project files.

  • When you finally move all your projects and files from GitLab to GitHub, you can set up your application infrastructure and trigger Pipelines from GitHub. This means development teams on GitHub can use their preferred VCS while seamlessly integrating their workloads. With CTO.ai Open-source Workflows, you'll get powerful collaboration capabilities like Agile planning, Version Control, and Code Review that enables you to deploy anywhere right out of the box.

Conclusion

GitHub is a development platform that lets teams build software and collaborate seamlessly. To keep up with application development and deployment and migrate your centralized applications to distributed cloud services using our Platform Engineering solution to become faster and more efficient, Sign up for free on our Platform and develop your applications with our Open-source Workflows on GitHub .