Migrating a GitHub organization from GitHub.com to GitHub’s Enterprise Managed Users (EMU) is no small feat. It’s not as simple as renaming your enterprise and organizations, or clicking a button.
GitHub EMU is a separate platform, which makes migrations more complicated than what people expect. Your repositories must be transferred using GitHub’s own migration tool. While GitHub’s native migration tool handles repository transfers, copying important elements of the repositories like issues and releases, it leaves critical components such as users, team structure, permissions, rulesets, packages and LFS objects behind.
As a result, teams who prefer to do the migration themselves rather than retaining professional services find themselves building their own migration tools to handle migrating the remaining components, an effort that is time-consuming and error-prone. At Arctiq, we’ve experienced these migration challenges firsthand, which is why we built the GitHub Post-Migrator: a comprehensive, automated solution designed to close the gaps in enterprise migrations.
What are the Advantages of GitHub EMU
GitHub EMU is a feature that allows organizations to centrally manage their developers' GitHub identities through their existing identity provider (like Azure AD or Okta), ensuring all user accounts, access permissions, and repositories are controlled by the enterprise rather than individual users.
Customers choose GitHub EMU because it provides enhanced security and compliance by giving IT administrators complete control over user lifecycle management, enforces consistent access policies across all GitHub resources, and ensures that when employees leave the organization, their access is automatically revoked.
Where GitHub’s Migration Tooling Leaves a Gap
Migrations to GitHub EMU often stall at the finish line. Their official GHE migrator focuses solely on repositories. It does the migration of the Git component very well, but leaves IT and DevOps teams to manually migrate everything else:
- Recreating teams and hierarchies
- Changing LFS references in repositories
- Reclaiming mannequins (orphaned user references)
- Handling GitHub’s rate-limiting errors
These tasks can be complex and laborious, especially for large organizations. In-house script-based solutions introduce risks, and even minor oversights can lead to broken permissions, lost data, or delays. Weeks can be wasted in dry-runs and migrations that have to be restarted from scratch.
To date, GitHub hasn’t signaled any plans to provide a tool to fill this gap, leaving room for complementary solutions.
Introducing Arctiq’s GitHub Post-Migrator: Closing the loop on your migration
Arctiq developed a tool named the GitHub Post-Migrator, which automates every post-repository-migration task that GitHub’s native tool leaves behind. Designed for simplicity and reliability, it’s already powered seamless migrations for Arctiq’s own clients.
Key Features That Make It a Game-Changer
Arctiq’s Post-Migrator is designed in a hands-off approach. In other words, it will perform the entire post-migration steps by itself without user intervention.
- End-to-End Automation: Migrates teams, memberships, LFS objects, and mannequins in a single workflow.
- Pre-Flight Checks: It proactively identifies issues before they derail your migration.
- Rate-Limit Handling: It intelligently manages GitHub’s API limits, allowing unattended execution.
- Flexible Execution: Can run specific steps independently of each other or perform a full migration.
- User Mapping: Simplify Enterprise Managed Users transitions with a CSV file linking old and new identities.
The tool I developed replaces convoluted scripts with a hassle-free process, making it a game-changer for enterprises navigating complex GitHub migrations. As one client representative puts it, "We couldn’t have done this migration this easily without this tool."
Get Started Today
Clients trust Arctiq’s solution, which has proven itself in enterprise-scale migrations as a cost-effective solution that can be used as a standalone tool or paired with Arctiq’s migration services.
If, like many other companies, you’re planning to migrate to GitHub EMU to take advantage of its enhanced security and management features, our Post-Migrator is your key to simplifying your migration process and reduce your team’s workload.
Ready to make your migration smoother? Let Arctiq’s tools and experts handle the heavy lifting, or just reach out for a conversation. We’re happy to be part of your strategy.
