I have a major problem - I use too many git services. I have projects on github, gitlab, an internally hosted gitea instance and just the other day I thought about checking out forgejo.

For the most part this is “ok” in that as a serial side-project abandoner I’m not dealing with all these at the same time… however I’ve decided to get my life together and make a decision

The Decision

Moving forward, github will be my primary service.

Why github? Well for several reasons:

  • It works ( all of them do so this isn’t a good one )
  • I quite like the workflows
  • My active side project is there
  • I prefer the UI to gitlab

And let’s face it, this “blog” is just turning into an excuse to do light infrastructure stuff

Let’s do it

First step is to create a new repo in github, this is pretty straightforward

With that created, I can change my repo’s origin url

git remote set-url origin git@github.com:neo1908/blog.git

And while we’re at it let’s rename the repo locally as well. This isn’t strictly required but I prefer the local repo names to match the names on the remote

mv pages blog

We can then push and make sure everything goes where we expect

git push

Now we need to configure the github side. In our new repo I can go to Settings and then pages

I’m going to deploy using github actions, specifically hugo, so I selected that as my source.

Before configuring a custom domain I need to update the DNS in cloudflare. Github automatically prefixes apex domains with www which is a bit irritating… The github pages docs suggest configuring DNS for both www and the apex so that’s what I’ll do.

First I need to delete the old gitlab DNS. I could have just edited it, but I deleted it instead because I could. At this point the monitoring alerted.

Yes I monitor this page…

Now configure www

www.st2projects.com.	1	IN	CNAME	neo1908.github.io.

And now the apex

www.st2projects.com.	1	IN	CNAME	st2projects.com.

With that complete we can go and get a drink. Cloudflare DNS propagation is pretty fast, but I find waiting a few moments to be very reliable.


Welcome back… Now we can go and at st2projects.com as the custom URL of the page. Once the DNS check is completed it’s time to publish the page.

Publishing

We need to add the workflow to publish the site, it’s quite long so here’s a link. Just like the gitlab version it’s set up to run on pushes to the main branch.

With this added we can do the usual git magic

git add .github/
git rm .gitlab-ci.yml

git commit -m "Migrate to github"
git push

And all being well the workflow will trigger

Success! So if you’re reading this, it’s all worked out just fine. Catch me next week when I decide to migrate somewhere else…