Bugzilla -> Redmine Migration Script

For a few years now we’ve been using Bugzilla as a project management tool in addition to tracking issues. We’ve been able to get by with this however we’ve always known that Bugzilla is not intended to be a project management tool and so we started looking for a more suited alternative.

Enter Redmine. Redmine is a flexible project management web application. Written using Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database, and open-source. In addition to issue tracking, it also has project management features, project based wikis and document management. Redmine also integrates tightly with most common versioning systems including Subversion and CVS.

As attractive as Redmine was, we still had thousands of clients, bugs, comments, and files in Bugzilla. We could not afford to lose this information and we certainly didn’t want to notify our clients that they would have to use two different systems for tracking bugs and feature requests. To solve this problem I wrote a migration script that transfers virtually all of the information in Bugzilla including attachments, permissions, bugs, comments, projects, etc. into Redmine.

The bulk of my experience is with PHP and Java. Being new to the Ruby world, and since Bugzilla is written in PHP, I decided to write this migration script in PHP instead of Ruby…

ArchiveDownload bz2redmine.tar (40,690 bytes)

If you are unable to unpack this file download WinRar here.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 7:04 am and is filed under Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. Vide says:
    May 19, 2009 at 2:49 am

    Hi Robert

    thanks for publishing the script you did, it’s going to be really useful to me as well. Just one question: which Bugzilla version did you use as source for the migration? And Redmine?

    Thanks again a lot!

  2. Robert Heath says:
    May 19, 2009 at 8:13 am

    I used Bugzilla version 3.1.3 and Redmine version 0.8.0.stable.2361

  3. Ralph Juhnke says:
    September 28, 2009 at 2:16 pm

    Hi Robert,

    i have been writing a ruby migration script and i have been
    reusing quite a bit of your code. especially the SQL-Statements and the mapping
    of Bugzilla-entities to Redmine-entities have been a great help for me.

    Thanks a lot

    you can find the script here:

    http://github.com/ralli/bz2redmine

  4. Carl Doherty says:
    July 2, 2010 at 3:22 pm

    DO NOT use this script for anything important! BugZilla and Redmine have both had substantial updates in the past few months. Without using the exact versions that Mr. Heath wrote this script using, you can’t be sure your data will be properly preserved.

    If you need to migrate from BugZilla to Redmine, write your own script and TEST. If you can’t do that, you have no business professionally programming at all. Harsh maybe, but true.

  5. Big Bad Bison says:
    July 4, 2010 at 1:07 pm

    Mr. Doherty is correct, the migration script was written for a specific project over a year ago and may be out of date. If you need assistance using this script for your migration please feel free to contact me or leave a comment on this post.

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