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Warning

Migrations are coming to VA GitHub. See the Migrations section for more information.

GHEC-EMU Migrations

Information on migrating VA GHEC-EMU to GHEC-US

VA GitHub migrations to GHEC-US will begin with migrating the GHEC-EMU enterprise starting mid July 2025.

The VA GitHub project team will send notifications to GHEC-EMU users and teams to inform users of the migration schedule. Once a team’s migration window is open, the team will have a set time period in which to perform their migrations. These details are still being determined and will be communicated by VA when ready.

Early Access

GitHub has sent email to all GHEC-EMU users asking for volunteers to receive early access to GHEC-US and our migrations workflows prior to production migrations being scheduled, for testing the workflows and the system. If you wish to be added to the early access list then create a GHEC-EMU support request to request access.

Early users will have access to the software-test organization where they can create repositories and test development workflows. Early versions of our migration workflows are also available in the github-admin/migration-actions-test repository. There are issue templates in this repository for various workflows such as:

  1. Migrate Repository from GHEC-EMU
  2. Migrating Projects from GHEC-EMU
  3. Migrate Repository from GHEC
  4. Migrating Projects from GHEC
  5. Migrating Packages from GHEC (there is no use of GitHub Packages in GHEC-EMU)

Detailed instructions on using these migration workflows are provided in the GHEC-US handbook.

Accessing GHEC-US

Active GHEC-EMU users will be bulk onboarded to GHEC-US in advance of the migrations schedule timeframe. Logging into GHEC-US is essentially the same as logging into GHEC-EMU: GHEC-US also uses Entra ID for identity and authentication so you will be redirected to VA Entra ID to login when accessing GHEC-US. You will be required to login using your va.gov account and PIV.

Getting Support

Similar to GHEC-EMU, GHEC-US users can get support from GitHub by creating support requests in the github-admin/support repository.

Migration Instructions

Production migrations will be facilitated by creating issues in the GHEC-US github-admin/migration-actions repository. This repository will have the same issue templates as mentioned above. Detailed instructions are provided in the GHEC-US handbook.

Differences between GHEC-EMU and GHEC-US

Software Organizations

GHEC-EMU users will find GHEC-US to be similar to GHEC-EMU. One major difference is that we are consolidating all repositories into a single organization in GHEC-US, the software organization. The GHEC-US software organization is equivalent to the GHEC-EMU dva-software organization. GHEC-EMU has three other VA software organizations that are not being recreated in GHEC-US:

Repositories in these GHEC-EMU organizations will be migrated into the GHEC-US software organization, along with all other VA repositories. When migrating repositories, the issue form enables the user to select the source organization that they are migrating a repository from.

Since we are migrating repositories from multiple organizations into a single organization, there is the possibility for repository name conflicts in the destination organization. Our migration workflows do not yet handle name conflicts gracefully or allow users to enter new names for the migrated repositories, the new migrated repositories will have the same names as the source repositories. If there is a repository of the same name in the GHEC-US software organization already, then the migration workflow will fail. Users can avoid this situation by searching the GHEC-US software organization for the repository names before submitting the migration workflow, and renaming their source repositories if conflicts are found.

Future versions of our migration workflow may handle this situation more gracefully and allow the user to enter a new name for the migrated repository.

Admin Organization

Similar to the GHEC-EMU GitHub Admin Support (dva-admin) organization, GHEC-US has a GitHub Administration (github-admin) organization that contains the repositories and resources that the GitHub team uses to manage the VA’s GitHub enterprise. Here you will find an internal support repository which is where VA GHEC-US users can create support requests to receive help from the GitHub team.