Situation

On an interview people judge developers by their GitHub. Recently, I saw the tweet with picture showing GitHub contribution with one commit activity and the caption:

“Please don’t apply for a Senior dev position if your GitHub looks like this…”

In this blog post, I will answer the question of how to enrich GitHub statistics to improve your job prospects.

There are a lot of tools to fake GitHub history: 1, 2, 3. But they create unreal commits and it’s cheating. We need to find another way of enriching GitHub activity.

Resolution

You may remember that your company uses GitLab for day-to-day commits. Let’s export these commits to GitHub.

I use the tool import-gitlab-commits. It’s written in Go language, very handy to run, and exports commits in anonymized way to comply with NDA.

I will import my Clarity’s commits from their internal GitLab VCS clarity.gitlab.com. My GitHub statistics for 2020 year before running import-gitlab-commits looks like:

Step 1: Install import-gitlab-commits

First, let’s install Go and run the command

go install github.com/alexandear/import-gitlab-commits@latest

Step 2: Execute import-gitlab-commits

Next, set required environment variables:

export GITLAB_BASE_URL=https://clarity.gitlab.com
export GITLAB_TOKEN=your_secure_token
export COMMITTER_NAME="Oleksandr Redko"
export COMMITTER_EMAIL=oleksandr.red+github@gmail.com

where

GITLAB_BASE_URL is a GitLab instance URL.
GITLAB_TOKEN is a personal access token. Will be used to fetch your commits from GITLAB_BASE_URL;
COMMITTER_NAME, COMMITTER_EMAIL are my GitHub name with surname and email.

And run the command:

import-gitlab-commits

The tool will do the following operations:

Connects to GITLAB_BASE_URL using GITLAB_TOKEN and gets my oredko user info.
Fetches all GitLab projects that oredko contributed.
For all projects retrieves the commits where author is oredko.
Creates the new repo repo.clarity.gitlab.com.oredko on a disk. Adds new commits for all fetched info with the message Project: <PROJECT_ID> commit: <COMMIT_HASH> and committer Oleksandr Redko <oleksandr.red+github@gmail.com>:

Step 3: Create a GitHub repository and push to it

Finally, follow the guide and create a new GitHub repository called clarity-contributions.

Open the repo created by import-gitlab-commits and push to GitHub:

cd repo.clarity.gitlab.com.oredko
git remote add origin git@github.com:alexandear/clarity-contributions.git
git push

That’s it. My empty GitHub contribution graph from 2020 became full of commits:

Sum Up

In this article, I suggest a way to enrich GitHub activity by exporting real GitLab statistics. The import-gitlab-commits tool is a good tool for this purpose.

Importing Commit History from GitLab to GitHub