GitHub Welcomes the OpenJDK Project!
Earlier this month we were thrilled to welcome the OpenJDK Community to GitHub. The communities migration effort, codenamed Project ‘Skara’, brought JDK 16 main-line development into GitHub. The JDK project is at the…

Earlier this month we were thrilled to welcome the OpenJDK Community to GitHub. The communities migration effort, codenamed Project ‘Skara’, brought JDK 16 main-line development into GitHub. The JDK project is at the heart of the Java community and Java is one of the most popular languages for projects on GitHub. Therefore it’s a massive honor that we now get to help the team building the future of the Java language.
OpenJDK ➡️ GitHub
The ‘Skara’ project has been an impressive effort from the entire OpenJDK community led by the Java Platform Group at Oracle. Previously, they were relying on self-hosted Mercurial servers; this project involved bringing all of the development team and their tooling over to Git as well as moving the community to GitHub.
How they did it
Like all big migrations, this was much more complex than just doing a hg-fast-export
and then a git push
. The team had to build custom CLI Tooling, bi-directional bridging with the OpenJDK mailing lists and integration with the OpenJDK bug tracking system. Some of the OpenJDK projects have also been busy adopting GitHub Actions for their CI builds. To do all this, the team created some fantastic integrations with the GitHub API as part of their Skara tooling. All of these integrations are now also open source and available in the OpenJDK GitHub organization.
GitHub ❤️ Java
OpenJDK joins a number of our most popular projects here on GitHub all written in Java, including Gradle, Maven, jUnit5, Elasticsearch, Spring, Apache Spark, Selenium, Helidon and more. Now the OpenJDK projects can take advantage of some of the features we built for Java developers on GitHub including free code scanning to look for security vulnerabilities, notifications and remediation of known security fixes as well as semantic code navigation in GitHub (which is powered by the Java based Elasticsearch project).
Please join us in welcoming the OpenJDK community to GitHub. If you would like to contribute or get involved in the project, please visit https://openjdk.java.net/contribute/.
Written by
Related posts

GitHub Availability Report: August 2025
In August, we experienced three incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.

Your guide to GitHub Universe 2025: The schedule just launched!
Create your own agenda of favorites, sign up for one-on-on mentoring sessions, and register if you haven’t already. We’ll see you there!

Explore the best of GitHub Universe: 9 spaces built to spark creativity, connection, and joy
See what’s happening at Universe 2025, from experimental dev tools and career coaching to community-powered spaces. Save $400 on your pass with Early Bird pricing.