Copybara
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
3recommend
1warn against
Dec 10, 2025first mention
Jul 1, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“extremely helpful in open-sourcing things from google3 to github.”
former Google employeeon “Google copybara: moving code between repositories”
“I use it mostly for a simple fire and forget export, where I take a folder out of its original repo and preserve the history.”
Show 1 more
“Copybara is one of those things that you should have set up yesterday.”
Caveats and dissent
“The tool turned out being unacceptably slow.”
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
Data: copybara.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 9
“There seems to be an absolute ton of reference”
We used Copybara to setup a hub-and-spoke model at Dagster where public-facing repos can live within our larger internal monorepo, and while it worked we had to do a lot of hacky things. https://dagster.io/blog/monorepos-the-hub-and-spoke-model-and-copybara
“I finally got around to open sourcing the patches I made to provide Perforce support”
“The tool turned out being unacceptably slow.”
“extremely helpful in open-sourcing things from google3 to github.”
“I use it mostly for a simple fire and forget export, where I take a folder out of its original repo and preserve the history.”
“Copybara is one of those things that you should have set up yesterday.”
“without much heavier tools like Copybara”
“I'd have had to use Google's Copybara (Java tooling or their GHA)”