Import from Gitter (beta)
Zulip supports importing data from Gitter, including users, channels,
messages, attachments, and avatars.
Note: You can only import a Gitter room as a new Zulip organization. In
particular, this tool you cannot use this tool to import from Gitter into an
existing Zulip organization.
Import from Gitter
First, export your data from Gitter.
Export your Gitter data
- Instructions for all platforms
-
Export your Gitter data. You will
receive json files of the public rooms that you are a part of.
Select the gitter_data.json
file of the room which you want to import into
Zulip.
Note: You'll need a Gitter API token to export data. You can get this
token by following the instructions in the "Getting Started" section of the
Gitter documentation.
Import into Zulip Cloud
Email support@zulip.com with gitter_data.zip
and your desired
subdomain. Your imported organization will be hosted at
<subdomain>.zulipchat.com
.
If you've already created a test organization at
<subdomain>.zulipchat.com
, let us know, and we can rename the old
organization first.
Import into a self-hosted Zulip server
First
install a new Zulip server,
skipping "Step 3: Create a Zulip organization, and log in" (you'll
create your Zulip organization via the data import tool instead).
Log in to a shell on your Zulip server as the zulip
user. To import with
the most common configuration, run the following commands:
cd /home/zulip/deployments/current
./scripts/stop-server
./manage.py convert_gitter_data gitter_data.json --output converted_gitter_data
./manage.py import '' converted_gitter_data
./scripts/start-server
This could take several minutes to run, depending on how much data
you're importing. The server stop/restart is only necessary when
importing on a server with minimal RAM, where an OOM kill might
otherwise occur.
Import options
The commands above create an imported organization on the root domain
(EXTERNAL_HOST
) of the Zulip installation. You can also import into a
custom subdomain, e.g. if you already have an existing organization on the
root domain. Replace the last line above with the following, after replacing
<subdomain>
with the desired subdomain.
./manage.py import <subdomain> converted_gitter_data
Logging in
Once the import completes, all your users will have accounts in your
new Zulip organization, but those accounts won't have passwords yet
(since for very good security reasons, passwords are not exported).
Your users will need to either authenticate using something like
Google auth, or start by resetting their passwords.
You can use the ./manage.py send_password_reset_email
command to
send password reset emails to your users. We
recommend starting with sending one to yourself for testing:
./manage.py send_password_reset_email -u username@example.com
and then once you're ready, you can email them to everyone using e.g.
./manage.py send_password_reset_email -r '' --all-users
(replace ''
with your subdomain if you're using one).
Create organization owners
The Gitter API don't contain data on which
users are administrators of the Gitter channel. As a result, all
Gitter users are imported into Zulip as normal users. You can follow
the Zulip documentation on
making a user an organization owner from the terminal
to mark the appropriate users as organization owners.
Caveats
-
The Gitter data export tool
doesn't support exporting private Gitter channels.
-
Gitter's export tool doesn't export email addresses; just GitHub
usernames. The import tool will thus use GitHub's generated
noreply email addresses to compute the
GitHub-generated noreply email address associated with that GitHub
account, e.g.
{github_user_id}+{github_username}@users.noreply.github.com
or
{github_username}@users.noreply.github.com
.
Since one cannot receive email at those noreply email addresses,
imported users will need to use GitHub authentication to log in to
Zulip and will be unable to receive email notifications until they
change their Zulip email address.
-
You can merge multiple Gitter channels into a single Zulip
organization using this
tool.
-
This tool doesn't translate Gitter's Markdown format into Zulip
format Markdown (there are a few corner cases where the syntax is
different). Additionally, Gitter's issue mention syntax isn't translated.