Google Code Reviews - Migration Instructions

Context

In October 2008, Google launched a set of experimental add-ons for Google Apps, dubbed Google Labs. One of the add-on was "Code Reviews" (Rietveld). This experiment has now run its course, and will be shutdown on August 31st 2015.

We recommend all active users to migrate as soon as possible to their own deployment, and copy the data before the deadline. We are very sorry for the inconvenience; Code Review has unfortunately not been maintained in the recent years, and we believe migrating to your own deployment is at this point the best option.

Alternatives

If you are not using Code Reviews for Google Apps anymore: you don't have anything to do, the "lab" application will be disabled on 2015-08-31. After that date, previous code reviews will not be accessible anymore.

If you are still actively using Code Review for Google Apps: you must migrate to your own instance of Rietveld by 2015-08-31, after which previous code reviews will not be available anymore. You can also simply take the data out and store them locally, although we only expect the data set to be usable via Rietveld.

Migrating the data to a regular instance of Rietveld

The migration can be done in three steps:

1. Set up a new instance of Rietveld, owned by your Google Apps domain.
2. Export the code review data from the Rietveld instance maintained by Google.
3. Import the data into the new Rietveld instance you have deployed in step #1.

More details follow, however please be aware of the following caveats:

• You should only migrate to a newly deployed instance of Rietveld. Migrating to an existing (non-empty) instance hasn't been tested, and may not work.
• You will need to secure your new deployment of Rietveld before using it (for instance associate the instance with your Google Apps domain, and enable forced login).
• If you serve the new instance on a subdomain you own, you will either need to enable https, or disable https in Rietveld (this is NOT recommended).
• If you have much code review data, you may need to enable billing, at least for data import, as the free quota may not be enough.

1. Deploy a new instance Rietveld

Follow the instructions provided by Rietveld itself.

Once deployed, you may want to:

• Associate the instance with your domain. See instructions.
• Enable forced login on Rietveld. This can be done by editing app.yaml and redeploying:

- url: /.*

  script: main.application

  login: required

• Switch to a custom domain, provided you are able to get an SSL certificate for that subdomain (or are willing to disable https, which we are not documenting here on purpose).

2. Export the existing code review data

Using the appcfg.py script provided by the App Engine SDK, and already downloaded as part of step 1, you can export your code review data to local disk:

appcfg.py -e <your email address> download_data \

    --url http://<your Google Apps rietveld domain>/remote_api \

    --filename /tmp/codereview.data \

    --log_file /tmp/codereview.log \

    --batch_size 100

Note that this only works for data currently hosted on the "labs" version of Google Code Review, for Google Apps users. The export endpoint is not available in regular Rietveld instance.

3. Import the code review data into your own instance of Rietveld

Using the same appcfg.py, simply import the data into your new instance:

appcfg.py -e <your email address> upload_data \

    --url http://<your AppEngine rietveld domain>/_ah/remote_api \

    --filename /tmp/codereview.data --batch_size 100

Important: before you can import the data, you need to enable the “remote_api” built-in feature in the target Rietveld instance. This is done by adding the following to the app.yaml file:

builtins:

  - remote_api: on

You will probably want to disable that once the import is done.

Support, contact

As an experiment, the Google Apps version of Code Review is not officially supported. That said, you may be able to get support from fellow Rietveld users on the codereview-discuss mailing list.

You may also be able to find more details in the following threads:

• https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/codereview-discuss/sXZCZNxaHn4