Archive February 2012

Moving files from a Git repository to another keeping history

2012/02/15 in Blog - 2 Comments

Yesterday I had to move a few files from a Git repository A to repository B while working on a client’s project. Today I had to do it again on another project. Again I had to think about the sequence of commands I had used. For this reason I’m posting this here.

Prepare repository A (the source)

git clone --no-hardlinks /path/to/sourcerepository repositoryA
cd repositoryA
# remove remote origin just so we can't break anything in the source repository
git remote rm origin
# filter for desired files
git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter directory HEAD
# move around files, etc.
# then commit
git add .
git commit -m"isolated files"

In line #1 we clone the source repository so we can’t break the original one, we also remove the remote in line #4 so no links back to the source repository exist. Next using the filter-branch command we filter out everything but the directory we want to keep. Read more…

Pull files to new repository

git clone repositoryB_URL repositoryB
cd repositoryB
git remote add repositoryAbranch /path/to/repositoryA
git pull repositoryAbranch master
git remote rm repositoryAbranch