Ability to move packages across repositories

[dentuzhik]

Hey guys, thanks for a shiny new space for feedback 🎉
It would be extremely useful to have an ability of moving a github packages across repositories, and have been brought up by several discussions in https://github.community:

• https://github.community/t/how-to-move-package-from-one-repository-to-another/137518
• https://github.community/t/move-npm-package-to-other-repo-package-is-already-associated-with-another-repository/2722/5
• https://github.community/t/can-i-move-a-nuget-package-to-a-new-repository/14832
• https://github.community/t/move-packages-from-one-repo-to-another/158312/2

Our cases are for this are specifically related to the fact that we are managing most of our code via monorepositories, and the following cases come out:

• Internal forks of open source libraries re-published in private registry, which we would like move to monorepositories and preserve the name (they can still be managed efficiently via git subtree)
• Merging packages into a single monorepo, merging several monorepos with packages together, or reverse splitting
• Restructuring teams and ownership of the packages, which sometime causes movement of the code across repositories

It is obvious that we can achieve this by renaming packages, however this quite a chore (and naming is hard) plus it causes non-zero educational overhead on the rest of the engineers which actually consume these packages, so if there would be a better way to change relationship to a parent repo, it would be nice.

Otherwise it would be interesting to hear rationale behind such strict package-repository lock, since other registries like NPM do not really have it.

[Hobart2967]

Hi @dentuzhik,

we had exactly the same problem over here. What we did:

Scripting a solution using Node.js + Axios + GitHub Rest Api:

• Pull information about packages (List of packages per repository)
• Download all packages and versions while getting the tarball URL using npm view <package> dist.tarball
• Untar files, adjust "repository.url" to the new repositories inside the package.json
• Delete all packages versions using the GitHub Rest API
• Upload the packages to the new repository using `npm publish``

That actually helped "moving" the packages :)

[maverick1872]

Why they're tightly associated to any repo other than for providing a easy link to it's source seems odd to me personally. Totally understand tightly coupling to the scope they're published under but I don't feel it should go further than that personally.

[eric-creekside]

More than 18 months later and no response. Is there a related feature request for this?

[shidil]

This is possible now by setting the repository field in package.json

This is what worked for me

1. Changed package.json repository field to point to new repo "repository": "git://github.com/org/new-repo.git"
2. Published a new version of the package (edit package.json version and npm publish)
3. Went to package settings https://github.com/orgs/{orgName}/packages/npm/{packageName}/settings
4. Previous repo will be displayed, along with an unlink (delete icon) button. Unlink the package
   
5. Published a new version (edit package.json version and npm publish)
6. Package moved to new repo!

Maybe step 2 can be skipped

[jschlechtehomer]

This worked for me. Thanks!