Note: Git-hg Mirror is now retired and replaced by our Mirror branches GitHub Actions workflow.Git-hg Mirror is a site of our own, that was previously built on Orchard 1 and was migrated to Orchard Core. The site is a simple-to-use (at least this is the intention) web application to automatically keep a Git and a Mercurial repository or two Mercurial or two Git repositories in sync. This allows you to create mirrors of repositories in the other version control system. The site’s FAQ page provides more information about the site’s purpose and functionality. This case study delves into the intricate journey of transforming Git-hg Mirror from its original Orchard 1 roots to the contemporary Orchard Core, highlighting the technical challenges and solutions that made this transition possible. Migrating a site from Orchard 1 to Orchard Core is beneficial because it allows you to take advantage of the latest features, improved performance and a more modern architecture, ensuring your website remains up-to-date and competitive in the ever-evolving digital landscape. As usual, we leveraged many of our own open-source modules that we've built and refined over time, such as Lombiq Helpful Extensions, utility modules like Lombiq NodeJs Extensions, Lombiq Base Theme as a base for the themes, Lombiq Hosting Tenants for tenant management, and Lombiq Helpful Libraries, as the name suggests, for generally useful libraries. The migration needed some work with User accounts (mainly a converter from Orchard 1 to Orchard Core and depersonalization maintenance, which is responsible for replacing the registered user's sensitive data like email address, the repository URLs or access tokens with randomly generated data for privacy reasons) thus this resulted in new additions to our open-source modules. Feel free to check these out, the User converter is now part of the Orchard 1 Recipe Migration feature and the depersonalization maintenance is included in the Lombiq Hosting Tenants project. Because of the user account migrations, the previously registered users will just have to reset their password the first time they try to log in, but they will get a notification about it and once they have done it, they will be good to go, nothing else has changed. We are happy with the results and the additions to our open-source modules and stay tuned, as we keep the migrations rolling.

The code behind our two-way Git-Mercurial sync service Git-hg Mirror is now open source! We're quite an open source company with dozens of projects on GitHub but up until now the code of Git-hg Mirror was private. Why? Simply because we didn't think it's worth open sourcing (being a very specific solution) and it was just easier not to do it. But suddenly several people nudged us in the last weeks so it's now all open source! Check out the Git-Hg Mirror Daemon and Git-Hg Mirror Common repos on GitHub!

If you're using a distributed version control system in your software development team (and you really should!) then most possibly you go with Git or Mercurial. But what if you'd really like to use a repository in your project that is on the other system? Now you can use Git-hg Mirror: it's a super-simple service that automatically keeps a Git and Mercurial (or two Mercurial) repos in sync, even with two-way syncing! Commits pushed to one repo will just magically appear in the other repo. What a time to be alive! The website is (obviously) built on Orchard - you can see our demo on the last Orchard Steering Committee meeting.