--- stage: none group: unassigned info: To determine the technical writer assigned to the Stage/Group associated with this page, see https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/ux/technical-writing/#assignments --- # Working with the GitHub importer In GitLab 10.2 a new version of the GitHub importer was introduced. This new importer performs its work in parallel using Sidekiq, greatly reducing the time necessary to import GitHub projects into a GitLab instance. The GitHub importer offers two different types of importers: a sequential importer and a parallel importer. The Rake task `import:github` uses the sequential importer, while everything else uses the parallel importer. The difference between these two importers is quite simple: the sequential importer does all work in a single thread, making it more useful for debugging purposes or Rake tasks. The parallel importer, on the other hand, uses Sidekiq. ## Requirements - GitLab CE 10.2.0 or newer. - Sidekiq workers that process the `github_importer` and `github_importer_advance_stage` queues (this is enabled by default). - Octokit (used for interacting with the GitHub API). ## Code structure The importer's codebase is broken up into the following directories: - `lib/gitlab/github_import`: this directory contains most of the code such as the classes used for importing resources. - `app/workers/gitlab/github_import`: this directory contains the Sidekiq workers. - `app/workers/concerns/gitlab/github_import`: this directory contains a few modules reused by the various Sidekiq workers. ## Architecture overview When a GitHub project is imported, we schedule and execute a job for the `RepositoryImportWorker` worker as all other importers. However, unlike other importers, we don't immediately perform the work necessary. Instead work is divided into separate stages, with each stage consisting out of a set of Sidekiq jobs that are executed. Between every stage a job is scheduled that periodically checks if all work of the current stage is completed, advancing the import process to the next stage when this is the case. The worker handling this is called `Gitlab::GithubImport::AdvanceStageWorker`. ## Stages ### 1. RepositoryImportWorker This worker starts the import process by scheduling a job for the next worker. ### 2. Stage::ImportRepositoryWorker This worker imports the repository and wiki, scheduling the next stage when done. ### 3. Stage::ImportBaseDataWorker This worker imports base data such as labels, milestones, and releases. This work is done in a single thread because it can be performed fast enough that we don't need to perform this work in parallel. ### 4. Stage::ImportPullRequestsWorker This worker imports all pull requests. For every pull request a job for the `Gitlab::GithubImport::ImportPullRequestWorker` worker is scheduled. ### 5. Stage::ImportPullRequestsMergedByWorker This worker imports the pull requests' _merged-by_ user information. The [_List pull requests_](https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/pulls#list-pull-requests) API doesn't provide this information. Therefore, this stage must fetch each merged pull request individually to import this information. A `Gitlab::GithubImport::ImportPullRequestMergedByWorker` job is scheduled for each fetched pull request. ### 6. Stage::ImportPullRequestsReviewsWorker This worker imports the pull requests' reviews. For each pull request, this worker: - Fetches all the pages of reviews. - Schedules a `Gitlab::GithubImport::ImportPullRequestReviewWorker` job for each fetched review. ### 7. Stage::ImportIssuesAndDiffNotesWorker This worker imports all issues and pull request comments. For every issue, we schedule a job for the `Gitlab::GithubImport::ImportIssueWorker` worker. For pull request comments, we instead schedule jobs for the `Gitlab::GithubImport::DiffNoteImporter` worker. This worker processes both issues and diff notes in parallel so we don't need to schedule a separate stage and wait for the previous one to complete. Issues are imported separately from pull requests because only the "issues" API includes labels for both issue and pull requests. Importing issues and setting label links in the same worker removes the need for performing a separate crawl through the API data, reducing the number of API calls necessary to import a project. ### 8. Stage::ImportNotesWorker This worker imports regular comments for both issues and pull requests. For every comment, we schedule a job for the `Gitlab::GithubImport::ImportNoteWorker` worker. Regular comments have to be imported at the end because the GitHub API used returns comments for both issues and pull requests. This means we have to wait for all issues and pull requests to be imported before we can import regular comments. ### 9. Stage::FinishImportWorker This worker completes the import process by performing some housekeeping (such as flushing any caches) and by marking the import as completed. ## Advancing stages Advancing stages is done in one of two ways: - Scheduling the worker for the next stage directly. - Scheduling a job for `Gitlab::GithubImport::AdvanceStageWorker` which will advance the stage when all work of the current stage has been completed. The first approach should only be used by workers that perform all their work in a single thread, while `AdvanceStageWorker` should be used for everything else. The way `AdvanceStageWorker` works is fairly simple. When scheduling a job it is given a project ID, a list of Redis keys, and the name of the next stage. The Redis keys (produced by `Gitlab::JobWaiter`) are used to check if the currently running stage has been completed or not. If the stage has not yet been completed `AdvanceStageWorker` reschedules itself. After a stage finishes `AdvanceStageworker` refreshes the import JID (more on this below) and schedule the worker of the next stage. To reduce the number of `AdvanceStageWorker` jobs scheduled this worker briefly waits for jobs to complete before deciding what the next action should be. For small projects, this may slow down the import process a bit, but it also reduces pressure on the system as a whole. ## Refreshing import JIDs GitLab includes a worker called `Gitlab::Import::StuckProjectImportJobsWorker` that periodically runs and marks project imports as failed if they have been running for more than 15 hours. For GitHub projects, this poses a bit of a problem: importing large projects could take several hours depending on how often we hit the GitHub rate limit (more on this below), but we don't want `Gitlab::Import::StuckProjectImportJobsWorker` to mark our import as failed because of this. To prevent this from happening we periodically refresh the expiration time of the import process. This works by storing the JID of the import job in the database, then refreshing this JID's TTL at various stages throughout the import process. This is done by calling `ProjectImportState#refresh_jid_expiration`. By refreshing this TTL we can ensure our import does not get marked as failed so long we're still performing work. ## GitHub rate limit GitHub has a rate limit of 5,000 API calls per hour. The number of requests necessary to import a project is largely dominated by the number of unique users involved in a project (for example, issue authors). Other data such as issue pages and comments typically only requires a few dozen requests to import. This is because we need the Email address of users in order to map them to GitLab users. We handle this by doing the following: 1. After we hit the rate limit all jobs automatically reschedule themselves in such a way that they are not executed until the rate limit has been reset. 1. We cache the mapping of GitHub users to GitLab users in Redis. More information on user caching can be found below. ## Caching user lookups When mapping GitHub users to GitLab users we need to (in the worst case) perform: 1. One API call to get the user's Email address. 1. Two database queries to see if a corresponding GitLab user exists. One query tries to find the user based on the GitHub user ID, while the second query is used to find the user using their GitHub Email address. To avoid mismatching users, the search by GitHub user ID is not done when importing from GitHub Enterprise. Because this process is quite expensive we cache the result of these lookups in Redis. For every user looked up we store three keys: - A Redis key mapping GitHub usernames to their Email addresses. - A Redis key mapping a GitHub Email addresses to a GitLab user ID. - A Redis key mapping a GitHub user ID to GitLab user ID. There are two types of lookups we cache: - A positive lookup, meaning we found a GitLab user ID. - A negative lookup, meaning we didn't find a GitLab user ID. Caching this prevents us from performing the same work for users that we know don't exist in our GitLab database. The expiration time of these keys is 24 hours. When retrieving the cache of a positive lookup, we refresh the TTL automatically. The TTL of false lookups is never refreshed. Because of this caching layer, it's possible newly registered GitLab accounts aren't linked to their corresponding GitHub accounts. This, however, is resolved after the cached keys expire. The user cache lookup is shared across projects. This means that the greater the number of projects that are imported, fewer GitHub API calls are needed. The code for this resides in: - `lib/gitlab/github_import/user_finder.rb` - `lib/gitlab/github_import/caching.rb` ## Mapping labels and milestones To reduce pressure on the database we do not query it when setting labels and milestones on issues and merge requests. Instead, we cache this data when we import labels and milestones, then we reuse this cache when assigning them to issues/merge requests. Similar to the user lookups these cache keys are expired automatically after 24 hours of not being used. Unlike the user lookup caches, these label and milestone caches are scoped to the project that is being imported. The code for this resides in: - `lib/gitlab/github_import/label_finder.rb` - `lib/gitlab/github_import/milestone_finder.rb` - `lib/gitlab/github_import/caching.rb` ## Logs > - [Introduced](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/48512/diffs) in GitLab 13.7. > - Number of imported objects [introduced](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/64256) in GitLab 14.1. > - `Gitlab::GithubImport::Logger` [introduced](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/65968) in GitLab 14.2. > - `import_source` [renamed](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/67726) to `import_type` in GitLab 14.2. The import progress can be checked in the `logs/importer.log` file. Each relevant import is logged with `"import_type": "github"` and the `"project_id"`. The last log entry reports the number of objects fetched and imported: ```json { "message": "GitHub project import finished", "duration_s": 347.25, "objects_imported": { "fetched": { "diff_note": 93, "issue": 321, "note": 794, "pull_request": 108, "pull_request_merged_by": 92, "pull_request_review": 81 }, "imported": { "diff_note": 93, "issue": 321, "note": 794, "pull_request": 108, "pull_request_merged_by": 92, "pull_request_review": 81 } }, "import_source": "github", "project_id": 47, "import_stage": "Gitlab::GithubImport::Stage::FinishImportWorker" } ``` ## Errors when importing large projects The GitHub importer may encounter errors when importing large projects. For help with this, see the documentation for the following use cases: - [Alternative way to import notes and diff notes](../user/project/import/github.md#alternative-way-to-import-notes-and-diff-notes) - [Reduce GitHub API request objects per page](../user/project/import/github.md#reduce-github-api-request-objects-per-page) ## Metrics dashboards To assess the GitHub importer health, the [GitHub importer dashboard](https://dashboards.gitlab.net/d/importers-github-importer/importers-github-importer) provides information about the total number of objects fetched vs. imported over time.