Updates to GitHub Importer and the deprecation of the Source Import REST API Endpoint

GitHub Importer is a tool that quickly imports source code repositories, including commits and revision history, to GitHub.com. As part of this release, GitHub Importer has implemented a new method for git source migration that will provide users with improved reliability and more detailed error handling when migrating git source repositories to GitHub. Click here to import your project to GitHub.

As previously communicated, this change comes with the ending of support for the REST API endpoints for source imports. Moving forward, these endpoints will return an error. Users are encouraged to make use of the new import repository page instead.

Lastly, we previously announced that GitHub Importer will no longer support importing Mercurial, Subversion and Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) repositories. Effective today, we’ve ended support for this functionality due to extremely low levels of usage. Moving from these alternative version control systems to Git is simple thanks to fantastic open source tools – for more details, read our Docs article, “Using the command line to import source code”.

You can now add organisation-level CodeQL model packs to improve code scanning coverage for your GitHub organization. This ensures that custom libraries and frameworks are recognised by CodeQL.

In most cases, the out-of-the-box CodeQL threat models provide the best coverage for identifying potential vulnerabilities in your GitHub repositories using code scanning. The CodeQL team at GitHub keeps a close eye on the most widely-used open-source libraries and frameworks to ensure CodeQL recognizes untrusted data that enters an application. For cases which cannot be covered by default, such as custom-built or inner-sourced frameworks and libraries, you can create custom CodeQL model packs to help CodeQL detect additional security vulnerabilities in your code.

Configuring CodeQL model packs in the organisation code security and analysis settings

When you configure CodeQL model packs at scale, the packs will be used in every code scanning analysis that uses default setup in the organization. By default, code scanning will download the latest version of each model pack, meaning that the latest changes to the pack (such as adding information about new frameworks) will automatically be included. Alternatively, you can configure specific sets of CodeQL models to use by stating a specific version (or version range). For more information, see Editing your configuration of default setup in the GitHub documentation.

You can use the CodeQL model editor in VS Code to easily create custom CodeQL model packs for libraries and frameworks written in C# and Java/Kotlin. Custom CodeQL model packs are also supported for code written in JavaScript and Ruby and we will be adding support for these and other CodeQL-supported languages in the CodeQL model editor in the future.

This functionality is now available on GitHub.com and will be available in GitHub Enterprise Server 3.14.

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GitHub Enterprise Importer (GEI) has implemented a new process for migrating git source data, significantly improving GEI’s reliability when migrating large repositories up to 10 GB with complex git histories. The new git source migrator is now available for all customers using GEI.

The new git source migrator uses the updated IP addresses for GitHub Enterprise Importer announced in October 2023. If you’re using GitHub Enterprise Importer to run migrations and have IP allow lists enabled, you will need to add our new IP range. The IP allow lists that may need to be updated include:

  • The IP allow list on your destination GitHub.com organization or enterprise
  • If you’re running migrations from GitHub.com, the IP allow list on your source GitHub.com organization or enterprise
  • If you’re running migrations from a GitHub Enterprise Server, Bitbucket Server or Bitbucket Data Center instance, the allow list on your configured Azure Blob Storage or Amazon S3 storage account
  • If you’re running migrations from Azure DevOps, the allow list on your Azure DevOps organization

For a full list of our IP ranges and more information, see our documentation on configuring IP allow lists for migrations.

For additional information about GEI, please follow our documentation for using GitHub Enterprise Importer

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