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I have reviewed many existing pages on SO about this subject and none of the solutions works. I am running git lfs migrate on an existing repository with 80,000+ commits, and thousands of tickets and pullrequests. git lfs migrate rewrites commit history and we are applying it to all branches. I want to then force push all the changed branches to the original repo. This is the ultimate goal. Now for the tests I have been running that are the direct subject of this post.

In my tests, I clone the target repo and run the migration locally before attempting to set and push to a new repository at a different github url. After this is complete I go to GitHub and alas all the branches are gone except master. I've tried using git push origin -u --all and --mirror and other variants posted here on SO all to no avail. I even got creative and just ra git push --mirror but still only master appears on the GitHub repo page. The documentation at https://git-scm.com/ is clear but it does not have the expected affect.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

reka18
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  • `git push --mirror` means "push all refs", so `git for-each-ref` will show you what would get pushed. What refs do you have in the source repository? – torek Dec 11 '19 at 16:56
  • When you did the clone of the target repo, did you do `git clone [--mirror](https://git-scm.com/docs/git-clone#Documentation/git-clone.txt---mirror)` to get a mirror of the source repository, including all the branches, on which you can then do the `git lfs migrate`? If you hadn't then your local clone won't have been a mirror, and pushing with `--mirror` won't have pushed the branches that you didn't have in your clone. – amaidment Jun 18 '20 at 14:18

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I know this is an old post but since I've been struggling with the same for the past 2 months or so, here is my 50 cent on the matter. When cloning the existing repo using git clone command so indeed only branch, default branch is being checkout. if you then execute git lfs migrate --everything --include =.... then the git lfs migrate will only take place on this one single branch that was checkout. then if you try to git push --mirror #newUrl#, the --mirror flag is using the --prune option (as discussed here - Git push --all vs --mirror). This is why you will only see one branch after using the git push --mirror command. Basically in order to overcome this annoying issue we:

  1. git clone our current repository
  2. using a shell script checkout every branch locally (so basic `git checkout #branchName#)
  3. executed git lfs migrate --everything --include
  4. once the migration done, we've executed git push --mirror #newRepoUrl# The git push --mirror here did two things: a. pushed all branches to the new repository b. pushed all refs as well, so branches, tags, replace, etc. This second option is really important as the --everything flag in the git lfs migrate command does taking care of all the refs, but regular git push or even git push --all (that covers only refs/branches as far as I know) and git push --tags (that covers refs/tags) won't push any other refs that might be changed during the git lfs migrate command. Using the git push --mirror #newRepoUrl# seems the only valid option.

Sorry for this longs post. If anyone has something to fix \ add \ change \ comment please feel free as it seems this topic is quite confusing.

Liran
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