I’ve used DreamHost’s SVN host­ing with past projects I’ve done. It was­n’t till recent­ly that I had time to migrate them over to Git. Search­ing the net, I found JohnAl­bin’s steps on how to do so effi­cient­ly (writ­ten in August 2010).1

Here’s a slight­ly-updat­ed-short­er ver­sion of that (con­tain­ing steps of my migra­tion to Bit­buck­et):2

1. Retrieve a list of all Sub­ver­sion com­mit­ters

   From the root of your local Sub­ver­sion check­out, run this com­mand:

   svn log -q | awk -F '|' '/^r/ {sub("^ ", "", $2); sub(" $", "", $2); print $2" = "$2" <"$2">"}' | sort -u > authors-transform.txt

   Edit each line in authors-transform.txt:
   stechico = stechico <stechico>
   into some­thing like this:
   stechico = Sherwin Techico <stechico@example.com>

2. Clone the Sub­ver­sion repos­i­to­ry using git-svn

   git svn clone [SVN repo URL] --no-metadata -A authors-transform.txt --stdlayout ~/temp

   In some of my ear­ly projects, I was­n’t using the “stan­dard lay­out”, but was using design/docs/www. So I had to update the file struc­ture before doing this step. I end­ed up mov­ing design and docs into branch­es, and renam­ing www to trunk.

   After run­ning the “git svn clone,” there were appar­ent­ly some branch­es that did­n’t need to be there. I just then delet­ed those by using the fol­low­ing, for exam­ple:

   git branch -rd design@364
   git branch -rd docs@364
   git branch -rd tags/template-structure@364
   git branch -rd trunk@364
   git branch -rd v4@364
   git branch -rd v5@364

3. Con­vert svn:ignore prop­er­ties to .git­ig­nore (per case basis)

   cd ~/temp
   git svn show-ignore > .gitignore
   git add .gitignore
   git commit -m 'Convert svn:ignore properties to .gitignore.'

4. Push repos­i­to­ry to a bare git repos­i­to­ry

   First, cre­ate a bare repos­i­to­ry and make its default branch match svn’s “trunk” branch name.

   git init --bare ~/new-bare.git
   cd ~/new-bare.git
   git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/trunk

   Push the ~/temp repos­i­to­ry to the new bare repos­i­to­ry.

   cd ~/temp
   git remote add bare ~/new-bare.git
   git config remote.bare.push 'refs/remotes/*:refs/heads/*'
   git push bare

   The ~/temp repos­i­to­ry can now be safe­ly delet­ed.

5. Rename “trunk” branch to “mas­ter”

   The main dev branch “trunk” (default in Sub­ver­sion) needs to be renamed to Git’s stan­dard “mas­ter” branch:

   cd ~/new-bare.git
   git branch -m trunk master

6. Clean up branch­es and tags

   git-svn makes all of Sub­ver­sions tags into very-short branch­es in Git of the form “tags/name”. We’ll want to con­vert all those branch­es into actu­al Git tags using:3

   cd ~/new-bare.git
   git for-each-ref --format='%(refname)' refs/heads/tags |
   cut -d / -f 4 |
   while read ref
   do
     git tag "$ref" "refs/heads/tags/$ref";
     git branch -D "tags/$ref";
   done

7. Share your new Git repo

   For this step, I cre­at­ed a new Bit­buck­et (Git) repo. Then, import­ed the exist­ing repo by adding a remote:

   git remote add origin ssh://git@bitbucket.org/username/new-git-repository.git
   git push -u --all origin

   The lat­ter com­mand above will push all branch­es. If you just want to push mas­ter, use:

   git push -u origin master

Note:
If you are want­i­ng to also cre­ate a new branch with­out any ances­try, exe­cute the fol­low­ing com­mands from any branch:

git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/your-new-branch
rm .git/index 
git clean -fdx

//Add your files to your new branch, then execute the following
git add -all
git commit -m 'Initial commit'

There you have it… I hope this helps you migrate your code/projects.

Source: JohnAl­bin & Git Com­mu­ni­ty Boook

1. If you have Ruby, you may try svn2git tool, which will skip steps 1–6. [↩]
2. Unlim­it­ed pri­vate and pub­lic repos?! Why not. Get yours at https://bitbucket.org/ [↩]
3. This mul­ti-line code will be prop­er­ly for­mat­ted once copy-and-past­ed onto a unix shell. [↩]