From Mantis to GitLab issues

In the last 5 years we used a bugtracker called mantis. Mantis is a great project and makes bugtracking really easy. Approximately one year ago we switch our projects from svn to git and we choosed GitLab (private instance) as our platform. GitLab is awesome, but that’s not the topic of that post. We quickly realize that GitLab also support issue tracking and it’s (surprisingly 😉 ) much more deeper integrated as we can ever do with mantis. GitLab offers some project importers f.e. GitHub, Bitbucket, … but Mantis wasn’t an option. So I’ve googled around a few days but i could not found a tool which was not marked as experimental. A few weeks later i’ve searched for an bug in cmake and saw that Kitware (the company behind cmake) also use gitlab and the gitlab issue tracker. I’ve click on the issue i’ve searched for and saw the following line

This issue was created automatically from an original Mantis Issue. Further discussion may take place here.

Kitware also used Mantis before GitLab and it seems that they have build a converter for it. I’ve send a mail about the tool to the mailing-list and i’ve got back an link to the tool which converts mantis issues to GitLab issues. The project has two python 2 scripts but only a “what is it”-readme file, but if you look into the code it is really easy to find out how the tool works. After 1 week of preparation i’ve converted all mantis-projects we have to GitLab issues thanks to this great tool from Kitware.

So if you ever come to the same situation, here is the link to the mantis-to-gitlab tool they have build

UPDATE: Time flies. There is also a fork of mantis-to-gitlab which works with more recent versions of GitLab.

Kitware, thank you very much, you are awesome.