Hi. I self-host gitea in docker and have a few repos, users, keys, etc. I installed forgejo in docker and it runs, so I stopped the container and copied /var/lib/docker/volumes/gitea_data/_data/*
to /var/lib/docker/volumes/forgejo_data/_data/
, but when I restart the forgejo container, forgejo doesn’t show any of my repos, users, keys, etc.
My understanding was the the current version of forgejo is a drop-in replacement for gitea, so I was hoping all gitea resources were saved to its docker volume and would thus be instantly usable by forgejo. Guess not. :(
Does anyone have any experience migrating their gitea instance to forgejo?
Can you see the data you copied inside the container? I’m quite sure you either don’t have the volume mounted, or the config files refers to a different folder than the gitea one did. Did your gitea container store data in sqlite as you are copying raw files rather than migrating a database?
I’d go with lxc instead of containers if you don’t fully understand docker. Overhead isn’t much different and you get a “normal server” where you can drop in forgejo to replace gitea
Can you see the data you copied inside the container?
That led me to my problem! I did have the volume mounted, but the container’s path was incorrect: Forgejo was recreating it’s resource files as a new install because where it was looking for them, they didn’t exist.
Thanks!
What are you using as a database? Also, from which Gitea version to which Forgejo version did you attempt the migration?
Why this backwards way of migrating? The recommended way to to replace the Gitea docker image with the Forgejo one and leave everything else in place. Maybe make a backup before that you can revert to in case something goes wrong though.
That’s essentially what they did.
You have a very loose definition of “essentially”. I can see easily see multiple ways of the OP’s copy approach failing while swapping out the container in place would not.
Can you share some of them so I might have an idea what to try to do differently?
You need to share more details about your setup, but as others have already mentioned, it could be an database issue, because usually Gitea is configured to use a Postgresql database.
Also make sure you don’t combine an upgrade with a migration, the Gitea and Forgejo versions need to be roughly the same. Especially around the 1.20 version there was a need to change the folder structure before upgrading.
That is what I did. And it didn’t work.
Why migrate from gitea to forgejo?
Thx! Will prob migrate as well!!
I recently did a bare metal migration from Gitea to Forgejo using NixOS, maybe this info is useful if you use SQLite (which I believe is the default): the SQLite database filename for Gitea is gitea.db and for Forgejo it’s forgejo.db so I had to do a rename. Before renaming I ended up with an empty Forgejo instance. Either way I hope you figure it out in the end. Good luck!
Thanks, I’ll try that.
Unfortunately that didn’t work for me.
No experience, but saw gorgeous has a guide to migrate. Their latest Blogpost states to do that ASAP coz they’re going to stop keeping the drop-in 1:1 replacement to advance in their cool feature set ;)
Okay so your post inspired me to make the switch. All I had to do was switch out the image to the forgejo one. Everything worked right away. To try to make things as clean as possible, I went ahead and renamed my bind volume paths and app.ini stuff from gitea to forgejo but no matter what I tried, once I started the container, the container would create a gitea directory with a new app.ini. I even tried to run the forgejo compose on another host and the app still creates a gitea directory within the bind mount. Am I doing something wrong. I understand it’s a drop in replacement but I’m sure there’s a way to get a cleaner cut over.
compose.yml
volumes:
- ./data:/data
Host directories
~/forgejo
- data - forgejo - renamed for the migration - git - ssh - gitea - gets created by the app no matter what I do or what paths are set in app.ini
- compose.yml
How do I keep forgejo from creating this gitea directory? Why doesn’t it create a forgejo directory???
Edit: gitea version was - 1.21.7 and forgejo replacement image is 1.21.7-0