About locked repositories
When you migrate repositories to or from GitHub products, your origin and destination repositories may be “locked” for migration. While a repository is locked, you cannot make any changes to the repository, such as pushing commits, creating issues, or commenting on pull requests.
Whether your repositories will be locked during migration depends on the tooling you use and the options you choose when you run the migration. When a repository is locked, a banner with the following text is displayed on the repository's page on GitHub:
This repository is currently being migrated. It's locked while the migration is in progress.
Often, repositories are unlocked automatically when the migration is complete. In other cases, unlocking a repository is a manual step, and the process required to unlock a repository depends on the migration tool you used.
Repositories locked by GitHub Enterprise Importer
While a migration is in progress, access to the destination repository is locked by GitHub Enterprise Importer. If the migration completes successfully, the repository will unlock automatically. However, if there's a problem with the migration, including a migration failure, the repository may remain locked.
GitHub Enterprise Importer does not lock source repositories by default. Source repositories will only be locked if you specify the --lock-source-repo option in the GitHub CLI, or the lockSource attribute in the startRepositoryMigration GraphQL mutation.
Note
We do not recommend locking source repositories unless you are certain you will not want to unlock them later. Consider archiving the repositories instead. For more information, see Archiving repositories.
For information about how to unlock repositories that were locked by GitHub Enterprise Importer, see Troubleshooting your migration with GitHub Enterprise Importer.
Repositories locked by the "Organization migrations" REST API
When you call the Start an organization migration endpoint to generate a migration archive for a source repository, the repository is not locked by default. The repository is only locked if you set the lock_repositories parameter to true.
If you lock a repository via this endpoint, you can unlock the repository using the Unlock an organization repository endpoint.
If the repository is stored on GitHub Enterprise Server, a site administrator can also unlock the repository using the site admin dashboard. For more information, see Locking a repository in the GitHub Enterprise Server documentation.
Repositories locked by ghe-migrator
When you use ghe-migrator, the destination repository on GitHub Enterprise Server is locked by default and is not automatically unlocked.
If the import succeeded, you can unlock the repository with the ghe-migrator unlock command. For more information, see Migrating data to GitHub Enterprise Server.
If the import failed, not all of your data has been migrated, and we recommend deleting the repository and retrying the migration, to prevent data loss.
If you're sure you want to use the repository, a site administrator can unlock the repository using the site admin dashboard. For more information, see Locking a repository in the GitHub Enterprise Server documentation.
The source repository is not locked by default, only if the --lock argument is specified when preparing the repository for export with the ghe-migrator add command. To unlock the repository, use the ghe-migrator unlock command. For more information, see Migrating data to GitHub Enterprise Server.
Repositories locked by the startImport GraphQL mutation
When you use the startImport GraphQL mutation, the destination repository is locked by default and is not automatically unlocked.
If the import succeeded, you can unlock the repository with the unlockImportedRepositories GraphQL mutation. For documentation, contact your Expert Services or GitHub Partner representative.
If the import failed, you cannot unlock the repository yourself. Because a failed migration means that not all of your data has been migrated, we recommend deleting the repository and retrying the migration, to prevent data loss.
If you’re sure you want to unlock the repository, contact us through the GitHub Support portal.