How to include GitHub issues & PRs in API-triggered repo import into GitLab?

Question

Many academic organizations are present as such on GitHub, but may also have a self-hosted GitLab CE instance.

In order to automatically and fully backup the former onto the latter, they may want to run some kind of script that triggers their GitLab to import all repos from their GitHub org. This is possible through the GUI with the github_importer (docu). It's not feasible manually and continuously for many repos.

Using GitLab's Create project and Import file APIs, I puzzled together this (Bash) code which creates GitLab projects from the given GitHub repos:

curl --request POST --header "PRIVATE-TOKEN: $API_SCOPE" \ --form "namespace_id=$GROUP_ID" \ --form "path=$REPO" \ --form "import_url=https://github.com/$ORG/$REPO \ https://git.domain.edu/api/v4/projects/

ORG would be the source organization on GitHub and GROUP_ID a dedicated GitHub-archive group on the GitLab CE instance.

However, this only imports files & Git history, not GitHub issues, PRs, labels, etc. but those are desired for a full backup. So, I wonder:

1. Is there a 3rd API endpoint relevant to this task? /projects/import seems to require a file attribute, but trying to read the file list from GitHub first, would probably exhaust the API limit too quickly for a a feasible backup solution.
2. Is there another --form "" flag one can add to the /projects requests that makes it behave like the github_importer?
3. Does the latter maybe have an undocumented API?
4. Does one need to use gitlab-rake import:github[…]?

Thanks for any hints to the above questions, or pointers to existing solutions/tools/scripts, regardless of language. Thank you!

PS: Yes, the above script would be overkill compared to GitLab's built-in Repository mirroring, but that doesn't include issues, PRs & labels either.

Answer 1

As of August 2018, 4. seems to be the only answer. Once GitLab's own "Import repositories API endpoint" issue gets implemented, it may become an option for 1..