Enterprise Live Migrations [Public Preview Feedback]

[boylejj]

Enterprise Live Migrations (ELM) is in public preview

Enterprise Live Migrations (ELM) is now available in public preview. ELM gives enterprise administrators a new way to migrate repositories from GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) to GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency, without the extended code freezes and business disruption that come with traditional migrations. Key features of ELM to consider when selecting a tool for your next repository migration are:

• Cutover in minutes, not days: ELM continuously syncs data from source to target, so developers keep working in their repositories throughout the migration. When you're ready, the cutover only requires the time to drain remaining in-flight changes. This is especially valuable for business-critical repositories contributed to by geographically dispersed teams where there is no convenient downtime window to fit a migration into.

• Built for the largest monorepos: ELM was purpose-built to handle the repositories that push existing tooling to its limits (i.e., massive monorepos with deep git history, large volumes of issues and pull requests, and constant activity around the clock). Resource-level progress tracking surfaces failures before cutover, so you can make an informed decision about when to proceed.

• Use ELM alongside GitHub Enterprise Importer: ELM complements GEI, giving you flexibility to choose the right tool for each repository based on its size, shape, and activity. Use GEI for straightforward migrations where brief downtime is acceptable, and ELM for the repositories that need a zero-disruption approach. Run them concurrently as part of the same migration strategy.

ELM runs as a service on your GHES appliance, driven by the elm CLI. ELM is delivered as part of GHES versions 3.17.14+, 3.18.8+, 3.19.5+, and 3.20.2+. This release ships with the most recent GHES patch releases.

To get started, check out the Enterprise Live Migrations documentation.

[kamaleshpanda]

This is exciting news! 🚀

Live migrations from GHES to GHEC with data residency will be a big improvement, especially for enterprises needing smoother transitions and compliance.

Looking forward to seeing how seamless and downtime-free the migration process will be 👀

[tomoaki-nosaka]

Thank you for making Enterprise Live Migrations (ELM) available in Public Preview.

We are currently evaluating ELM for a planned migration from GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) to GitHub Enterprise Cloud (GHEC).

During our evaluation, we noticed a limitation: repositories with public visibility on GHES are rejected by ELM.

In our GHES deployment, repositories are accessible only to authenticated employees. As a result, many teams use public visibility simply to make repositories visible across the company. However, our security policy for GHEC requires all migrated repositories to be private or internal.

Since the ELM CLI already supports the --target-visibility flag, it appears to support assigning a different visibility to the destination repository. Given this, we are unclear why a public source repository cannot be migrated directly to a private or internal destination repository.

Modifying the visibility of active, long-lived production repositories before migration introduces unnecessary operational risk. We would strongly prefer to migrate directly from GHES (public) to GHEC (private or internal) without altering the source repositories.

Is this a temporary limitation of the Public Preview, or is there an underlying technical restriction?

Supporting direct migration from GHES public repositories to GHEC private or internal repositories would make ELM significantly more practical for enterprise customers.