GitHub Backups

To fulfill auditing requirements, the Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) repository must have a backup on an internal, Idaho National Laboratory (INL)-based service. This is accomplished in two ways:

  1. A pull mirror is set up from the GitHub repository to https://gitlab.software.inl.gov, which updates the source code of all branches whenever pushes are made.

  2. A cron script is run every two weeks on Friday to manually retrieve all issues and pull requests and copy them into an internal backup CSV file. This is a full backup each time, not an incremental backup. This is necessary because repository mirroring between GitHub and GitLab does NOT retrieve issues and PRs, due to them being implemented slightly differently between the two services.

Backup for issues and pull requests in (2) is accomplished by:

  1. querying the GitHub Application Programming Interface (API) for a JSON file of the issues,

  2. using internal Python tools to parse the JSON into a dictionary, then

  3. dumping the dictionary into a CSV file.

Backups are maintained for at least two years; after which, older backups may be removed at any time to free up disk space. These backups can be located on any INL High Performance Computing (HPC) machine inside of the location:


/home/mooseadmin/auditingbackups/(repository name)

Restoring Backups

If the backup is ever needed for a restoration of MOOSE on GitHub, the CSV can be imported using the GitHub CSV Tools utility, available here. If, for whatever reason, the backed-up issues need to be introduced to GitLab, this can be accomplished by simply renaming the body header in the CSV to description (the script can similarly be altered to save the CSV in the GitLab format by replacing it in there as well).

warningwarning:The built-in GitLab issue importer is not recommended!

We strongly recommend against using the built-in GitLab issue importer, as it will not be able to import anything from the GitHub version of the repository except for the title and description of the issue. Using the GitLab importer will also result in the loss of every pull request, as GitHub considers all pull requests to be issues, but GitLab views them as a separate data structure.