Migrating Users and MR to a new gitlab instance

How to Use GitLab Migrations
1

Hi,
Im migrating from old gitlab version instance to a new gitlab version instance .
Because of a very old gitlab version that i had, i dicieded creating a new gitlab instance over upgrading.

I have copule of questions:

  1. I check in documentaion and found that MR can be migrated . The only close thing that i can do is to:
    a. using the GET api, export the MR to json
    b. using the POST api,create new MR in the new instance and plant the title/description/sourcebranch/targetbranch from the exported json .
    Am i right ?

  2. I want to migrate users, can we do it ? if no , let’s say i create a user that is idendical to the user i had in the old instance(same name same email same username). When new gitlab are using this user, for example in the git commit description, any chance of overriding data ? or from gitlab view the new user has nothing to and old users that are in the git log history.

Thanks,
Dan

2

Also on the same topic, after testing and migrating a single project from my old 11.11.8 gitlab server to my new 17 gitlab sever i saw in the project web page , that the “commits” number is 0.
When i click on the “commits” hyperlink i gets the commits list. The users including the users for each of the commit. Why is the “commits” number is 0 but still i can see commits list ?

3

A backup can only be restored to the same version. If you take a backup on Gitlab version 11.11.8 then it can be restored to 11.11.8 only.

Some people do suggest editing the metadata in a backup to get around it, but it’s not a supported or recommended option. Especially since there are a huge amount of changes between Gitlab 11 and 17, or even any of the earlier versions as well.

Your best bet, follow the upgrade path to upgrade your existing installation.