Migrating Wiki content from CodePlex to GitHub

I’ve seen a few articles on migrating your projects from CodePlex but they kind of ignore the Wiki and suggest just copying and pasting the text across. There is a way which will copy the entire contents and only require a little manual work. The instructions below are the steps I took to migrate the 32feet documentation across. There were 76 files in total so much easier that copying and pasting!

First from the Home page of your CodePlex project you’ll see a button “Download Wiki” in the page toolbar. Click this to download a Zip file containing all the documents and supporting attachments for your Wiki.

This contains two folders, one in raw CodePlex format and the other (called “docs”) in Markdown. You’ll want the Markdown version. There are two standard files in this folder – Home.md is the homepage – the equivalent to your Readme on GitHub. This one you’ll probably want to copy and paste into a Readme.md file in your new repository. The Documentation.md is the entry point into your documentation Wiki. I removed the Home.md after copying the contents and renamed Documentation.md to Home.md as this is now the entry point into the Wiki documentation. If there are hard links back from child pages these may require fixing.

In your GitHub project go to the Wiki tab and you’ll see an option on the right “Clone this wiki locally”. You can then use Visual Studio or any Git tool of your choice to work on a local clone of the Wiki repository.

This should be empty for a new GitHub project. Once you’ve done this you can copy all the Markdown and attachment files you downloaded and unzipped from CodePlex into this folder. Commit and Push this git repository and you’ve uploaded a (mostly) working Wiki to your new site.

After doing this I noticed a couple of issues which required further changes. Firstly the inline code examples were broken:-

A bit of digging revealed a slightly different “tag” for code in GitHub markdown which should be:-

Another quick fix was that GitHub requires tables to have a preceding blank line otherwise it just renders as raw text full of pipes.

The last big formatting issue was the main Wiki page uses a number of anchors to various points in the table of contents and this was broken in conversion. It appears that there are automatically generated anchors for top level headers only. It is possible to workaround (although it feels dirty) by using inline HTML A tags e.g. replace

{anchor:General Bluetooth Data Connections}

with

and link to it using

[General Bluetooth Data Connections](#user-content-general-bluetooth-data-connections)

I hope this helps you as you migrate your own projects from CodePlex.