How do I transfer contributions to another account

[catalincatrina]

I am talking about the contributions that show up as a grid in my user profile. I have two accounts, one for work, one for personal use, and I want for my work account contributions to show on my personal account as well.

The reason for that is because once I will not work for the current company anymore and they will close/delete my email, I will lose access to that account, I will be left with only my personal account, and it will appear as if I didn’t do any work, for future employers.

How do I link the activity from one account to another, both being mine? One of them has as primary email my personal email, and the other has as primary email the email I was given from work.

[jfullstackdev]

just simply add the email tied to those commits in the other account,

of course, it should be deleted first at the user that you want to abandon

I’m not very sure when the company deleted your work email or whether you can still claim it, maybe you can ask here

  <a href="https://support.github.com/contact/account" target="_blank" rel="noopener">support.github.com</a>

Accounts - GitHub Support

GitHub Support is here to help. Learn about GitHub products, browse our helpful resources, and contact support with your questions.

[catalincatrina]

My company didn’t delete my email yet, but they will most likely do it once I stop working there in the future.

So I need to first delete the work email from the work account, and add the work email into my personal account. I guess I will do that at the very end before resigning.

What about when I’ll lose access to the work email though? What happens when they will eventually delete it? Will the contributions dissapear as well?

[jfullstackdev]

catalincatrina:

What about when I’ll lose access to the work email though?

when you just lose the access, you can still add it unverified and the commits will be added

catalincatrina:

What happens when they will eventually delete it?

this is I’m not very sure of that’s why I said try asking it at contact

https://support.github.com/contact/account

or maybe some member of the GitHub Staff here knows the answer and will comment,

[skverma618]

So is it really possible to transfer git history from one account to another?

[queenofcorgis]

👋t3: @catalincatrina - was @jdevstatic able to assist here, if so don’t forget to mark their comments as the solution for any other users who may encounter this, thanks!

[catalincatrina]

He definitely helped but there is still the edge case about what happens if my company will delete my email after I leave? will my commits / history/ contributions on the github account associated with that email, stay?

[queenofcorgis]

Thanks for asking: It doesn’t need to be a working email address, or to be verified, in order to match commits to your profile as contributions so they should stay.

[amddevmh]

why so many downvotes here?

[sglover-onemedical]

it seems like maybe it doesn't work?

[siddhantsingh-25]

Now, i have no clue, whether to move forward with it or not. Someone pls help!!

[irfanbabar]

@jdevstatic I m stuck, how to remove the email address of the company from the company GitHub without adding another email address?

what I understand from above is that in order to add my work email address to my personal Github account I have to remove it first from my work account.

[CriticalGnome]

@jdevstatic I m stuck, how to remove the email address of the company from the company GitHub without adding another email address?

what I understand from above is that in order to add my work email address to my personal Github account I have to remove it first from my work account.

You still can delete old GitHub account

[karkinissan]

Hi, I want to do this as well. How was this resolved?

[Aideepakchaudhary]

@catalincatrina how do you solve this ?

[AimoreRRD]

I also wasn't able to get my activity by removing the email from my business account and adding it to my personal email.
Do I have to wait for them to appear? Or does it mean that old activity with that account cannot be transferred, only future activity?

[RahulSomaliya]

@queenofcorgis, I've got the same issue as well please provide more clarity, my concerns are;

• My company's repo is a private one like most of us, so will I be able to get contributions anonymously without risking their codebase?
• If yes, how do I resolve this email already in use issue while adding the company email to my personal account? some guys here suggested deleting the company email account from GitHub first, is that the correct way of doing it? won't that action lead to deleting my contributions altogether? If not, or there is some other way - please share me a precise guide for doing it.

Anyone who's already done this please help, this is important!

[sumanabhi]

Okay Let me check that But I'm pretty sure that it was associated with the email only. let me check once again.

[AnujCMD]

@sumanabhi My contributions are also not reflecting up, did you found any solution?

[sumanabhi]

@AnujCMD Not yet. I didn't find this solution working as well. because as soon you add some another email there in that work account then automatically all the commits got linked with that one. and that's the main reason that is not reflected in our current account.

I guess it will only work if the work github account got deleted.

[AashishKumar-3002]

Hey , what was the final solution. when I try adding my email into my account it says already in use and when i try removing my email from the work git account it says needs at least one email. Will i have access to the private repos of my organization

[sumanabhi]

@ALL I guess it is gonna work only in the case when your work account must be deleted.

Even I tried all the above steps but nothing is working. I'm still open to get some concrete solutions around this.

[andrescn20]

The only solution is to add the work email (already associated with your commits) to your personal account. In order to achieve this you have to "free" your work email. You can do this simply by adding a new primary email to your work account and then deleting the one you were previously using. Now that this email is free, you can add it to your personal account. Oh and yes, the commits are the contributions. As long as your contributions are associated with the email you just moved, they will be updated on your personal account. Btw, I did it exactly for the same reason you are planning on doing it.

[AashishKumar-3002]

Hey , what was the final solution. when I try adding my email into my account it says already in use and when i try removing my email from the work git account it says needs at least one email.

[alvingalit]

I created a new github account using my work email, too. I was wondering if there is a period after deleting this account which will keep me from adding my work email to my personal account?

[hugomiranda94]

How long did it take for your contributions from the "work profile" to be shown on your "personal profile"? @catalincatrina

[cucupac]

Any answer to this? I'm in the same boat.

[hugomiranda94]

I don't have them, I did set up my work email into my personal profile but no contributions. I don't think it works, maybe it will until I delete my work account, but I'm still working at the same company; my idea was to "merge" the two accounts into one, but no luck unfortunately

[thomaschow]

Hi, ping on this question? I've tried adding my work email to my personal github account after assigning my work account a temporary email, but I still don't see my work contributions showing up on my personal profile.

[hugomiranda94]

I was finally able to see my contributions after setting the "Include private contributions on my profile" to true. This works as long as the email with which you made contributions is set on your account and verified as well, so you will need to have access to that email to accept GitHub's verification email once you add it to your account.

[sglover-onemedical]

Did anyone get this to work (e.g. get contributions to one personal account to accrue on one main personal account)?

[jdvivar]

Have you tried with this projects?
https://github.com/kefimochi/sync-contribution-graph
https://github.com/charpeni/sync-external-contributions

[Mohammad-Almosallam]

So here is the solution✨ (No workarounds)

I have tried all the above solutions, but none worked for me. It definitely helped me understand the issue very well, I even contacted Github support to get more information on this issue.

So, If you are a person who has work account and wants to transfer commits to personal account , this is my solution for you:

The idea:

You need to detach the work email from the work account, and attach it to your personal account. That is how you will be able to get your work contributions transferred to your personal account.

How?

Step 1:
Github allows you to add multiple emails in one account, This is only under the condition that this email is free, meaning it isn't under other account (e.g. your work account). Hence, in order to transfer our work email to our personal account we need to set it free first.

This can be done as follows:

1. Create a new email that isnt linked to any github account so that it acts as a placeholder
2. Add the new email into your work account. (Settings > Emails > Add email address field)
3. Set the new email as primary email for your work account. (Settings > Emails > Primary email address field)
4. Free the work email from work account by clicking on the trash icon

Now your work email that has all your contributions is free!, so it can be linked to your personal account!

Step 2

1. Sign out from your work account.
2. Log in to your personal account
3. Add your work email to your personal account but do not set it to primary.

Congrats🎉, your contributions will now appear in the graph.👏🏻 If it didnt appear in graph.. then there is a high probability that Keep my email addresses private is checked. which means you set web-based Git operations (e.g. edits and merges) to be sent from github. But don't worry this is simple and easy to fix.

Go to (Settings > Emails) , then uncheck Keep my email addresses private.

Enjoy❤️
Feel free to ask.
Resources here

[DaroMacs]

amazing, thanks!

[VirajMadhu]

Well, this solution worked pretty well. It might take some time to sync contributions. Thanks

[mgk815]

Hello, thank you for this post! I followed all the following steps and it is still not syncing. How long should it take?

[m-elagamy]

I have followed all the steps and still not syncing and unfortunately i lost most contributes on work account but nothing be added to personal account!

Before:(old contributes, almost have 950 now)

Now:

What happened?

[Rishaaaan]

This is a fantastic and thorough solution—works for me and thank you for sharing! 🙌

I’d like to suggest a neat trick that could make the process even simpler when trying to free up your work email: using plus addressing.

For example, if your work email is [email protected], you can add [email protected] in your GitHub email settings. Verification emails sent to [email protected] will still land in your primary inbox at [email protected]. This trick helps bypass creating a placeholder email while keeping everything streamlined.

@Mohammad-Almosallam If you think this could be helpful, I’d love to see it added to your steps to benefit more users who might face similar situations. A very neat trick!

I followed all these steps but i dont see any contributions added to my profile?

[jsspen]

The email trick isn't working for me. I've got my personal email and my work email added on both accounts and it didn't even complain about the email not being "free." I even tried setting them both to "primary" - no luck.

[hugomiranda94]

I was able to see my contributions after setting the "Include private contributions on my profile" to true. This works as long as the email with which you made contributions is set on your desired account and verified as well, so you will need to have access to that email to accept GitHub's verification email once you add it to your account.

[xorrvin]

Hey guys, just wanted to share yet another solution: https://github.com/xorrvin/gitoboros. Essentially it works the same way as other projects, but is available as a web version: https://gitoboros.xyz.

Cheers!

[SF-Prog]

I am having same issue, would be nice to have a neat solution for this scenarios into consideration, as many companies are currently leveraging security measures. We would like to show ourselves as active (contributions from work account into personal) but also to avoid the security team to point their fingers to us, or hold until we leave the company for this to happen.

[isturiz]

https://github.com/isturiz/sync-graph

Try that!

[isturiz]

I encountered this problem too, so I developed this solution: https://github.com/isturiz/sync-graph

It's simple to use with the CLI.

[angushhz]

It's help me resolve above problem. Anyone can try it !
isturiz/sync-graph#2

[JelleKoster]

Using these steps I found my old commits have a noreply e-mail address, probably because at the time of the commits my settings had the "keep my email addresses private" ticked.
Unticking this later does not reverse this for old commits.
As per the documentation, commits using noreply e-mail addresses cannot be transferred.

Therefore the syncing "fake" re-commit solutions mentioned in the other is the only way to get the sync graph to show your level of activity visually, but it will not stand up to any inspection when people want to see those commits.

As an alternate solution, I have created an organisation with both my accounts as members.
That will allow me to always have a historical view back to the separate accounts I had and their individual commit activities.