This is a program to import posts extracted from Google Groups into GitHub Discussions. It also contains a program to remove all GitHub Discussions from a repository, useful for testing.
First, you need to extract all Google Groups discussions to files using https://github.com/icy/google-group-crawler. After that step has been completed, this will use the mbox directory created as the source of data to import.
Usage: ruby import-into-github-discussions.rb owner repo token path group"
owner: GitHub account name
repo: GitHub repository name
token: GitHub access token (see https://docs.github.com/en/github/authenticating-to-github/creating-a-personal-access-token)
path: Local path to mbox dir created using https://github.com/icy/google-group-crawler
group: Name of Google Group, used for constructing URL
Usage: ruby remove-all-discussions.rb owner repo token"
owner: GitHub account name
repo: GitHub repository name
token: GitHub access token (see https://docs.github.com/en/github/authenticating-to-github/creating-a-personal-access-token)
- ruby - Programming Language
- graphql-client gem - For using GitHub Discussions's GraphQL API
- mail - For parsing the files in the mbox directory
If you create a separate account to perform the import, Github will likely flag it for abuse after the first few posts are made. The remainder of the posts will appear to be successful but will be failing silently. Reaching out to Github Support ahead of time to inform them of your upcoming import and asking them to flag the account as exempt from the automated abuse triggers might be advisable.
Importing will likely trigger a rate limit, which will also silently fail. Modifying
import-into-github-discussions.rb to add a sleep is advisable (1 second seems to work
but can be slow for large imports). The sleep call should be located below each
Client.query method call.
Any mentions (ie. @user) in message bodies will trigger a message to them during the
import (or multiple). It's recommended to sanitize the message bodies and strip out any
@user references to prevent this.
There is very little error handling done. There are no descriptive comments in the source code.
Files added to Google Groups are not copied.
Only the text part of the Google Groups post are used, so there isn't any formatting, other than how GitHub Discussions will handle the text as markdown.
The "General" Discussion Category is used for all posts.
The author of all posts in GitHub Discussions will be the GitHub user used to import, and the date will be the time the GitHub Discussion was created. This appends the original author (partially obscured email addresses) and original post date to the body of the discussion post or comment. The discussion post also contains a link back to the Google Groups post.
This was used to convert the ruby-forme Google Group posts to Discussions for jeremyevans/forme and jeremyevans/autoforme:
- Forme: https://github.com/jeremyevans/forme/discussions
- AutoForme: https://github.com/jeremyevans/autoforme/discussions
This code is licensed under the MIT license. See the MIT-LICENSE file for details.
Jeremy Evans code@jeremyevans.net