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Migrating LastPass Data to Bitwarden

Kenneth H. East [view page source]

After seeing lots of positive feedback on HN about the Bitwarden password manager, I finally decided to try it out. Because I had over 1,000 accounts in LastPass, many of which were crufty, I wanted to declare "account/password" amnesty while still keeping all the old account information "just in case." Here is how I migrated my LastPass database to Bitwarden.

About half of my accounts in LastPass were assigned to a "group", which somewhat helped contain account sprawl. This also means that the other half were not in any group. I wanted to bring these in to Bitwarden, but sequester them so that they did not pollute the "clean slate" I wanted to start with. To that end, I decided that I wanted to import all LastPass data into a Bitwarden folder named old. If any LastPass data was in a group, I wanted that data to appear in Bitwarden under old/groupname.

Turns out, this is pretty easy to do.

When your LastPass data is exported as a csv file, it contains a column named grouping, which contains the group which contains the entry, if any. I wrote a simple python script that read the exported LastPass csv, prepended the string old/ to the grouping, and printed the results to stdout.

# file: lpgrp.py
import csv
import os
import sys

csv_in = os.path.expanduser('~/Documents/secrets/lastpass/2018-11-12-export.txt')
csv_out = sys.stdout

writer = None
with open(csv_in, 'r', newline='') as csvin:
    with open(csv_out, 'w', newline='') as csvout:
        reader = csv.DictReader(csvin)
        for row in reader:
            if writer == None:
                writer = csv.DictWriter(csvout, fieldnames=row.keys())
                writer.writeheader()
            if row['grouping'] == '':
                row['grouping'] = 'old/none'
            else:
                row['grouping'] = 'old/' + row['grouping']
            row['grouping'] = row['grouping'].replace(' ', '')
            writer.writerow(row)

Here's how to do the import:

. Prepend old/ to all LastPass items: python lpgrp.py > bw-import.csv

. Create a top-level folder in Bitwarden named old. You can do this with either of

two methods: * Use the web interface to manually create the old folder. * Use the Bitwarden cli to create the old folder: bash bw login export BW_SESSION="your session key" bw get template folder | jq ".name = \"old\"" | bw encode | bw create folder

. In Bitwarden, import the file created in step 1.

Once the import completes, the LastPass account data is in a folder hierarchy in Bitwarden. This makes it quite easy to pick through old accounts on an as-needed basis and move them to a current folder hierarchy.