Question

While trialing Kiln we have imported everything into our trail account thinking we would be able to leave it there and tie it in with our self hosted Fogbugz but we stated else where () we can't do that. So I've purchased the developer bundle (excellent value btw thank you) and have installed that on our local server too.

Now is it possible to import from another Kiln instance? I've not tried it but just thought I'd throw it out there as no one else seems to have asked the same question. I'll have a play around myself and see what I can find, I'll log anything here that I find.

Cheers

Pete

Answer 1

What we don't have, and we'd like to have, would be a way to quickly just give you a giant dump of all your Kiln On Demand data you could load up into your local copy. While we can do that for FogBugz, we can't really do it for Kiln yet. The good news is that, because every Mercurial repository has the full history of how it came to be, this isn't a big problem. In fact, you can trivially move absolutely everything, with full history, except your existing Kiln On Demand code reviews.

To move your repositories manually:

First, I'd recommend grabbing the Kiln backup script. You can also write your own, if that one doesn't suit your needs. This will let you quickly grab all the repositories in your Kiln On Demand account.

Next, make the equivalent groups and repositories in your local Kiln install. Unfortunately, the pre-alpha Kiln API that shipped with Kiln 1.2 does not allow the creation of remote repositories, so you'll have to do this step manually, even if you like scripting. Rest assured we're working on that for Kiln 2.0.

Then, either push the repositories into their new home on your local Kiln via either TortoiseHg or hg push <target URL>; or, if you like scripting, write one last script that modifies the URL in each repository's .hg/hgrc file to point to your local Kiln install, and then you can simply hg push all repositories you cloned, and they should go to the right place.

Let me know if any of that isn't clear. There are a few steps, but they're pretty straight-forward. We'll work on improving this process in the future.

Answer 2

Here's what I just told a Kiln user looking to migrate:

You can't currently migrate the metadata from On Demand. Because 99% of the data is in the repositories themselves (which need to be re-imported to the local install), this hasn't been much of a problem for other customers. If this is an issue for you, please let us know!

What you will need to do is setup a fresh Kiln install, then re-setup the Kiln Projects, RepoGroups, and Repositories as well as any Kiln <-> FogBugz project mapping and specific user permissions.

When you push your repos into your new Kiln setup, you will of course have the full histories. You also lose a bit of Code Review metadata as well, so even though the review information (assignments, comments, line links) will be maintained in the FogBugz case if you ever need it again, it will not be properly tied to your new Kiln install (e.g. visible w/in Kiln).