Igor Kromin |   Consultant. Coder. Blogger. Tinkerer. Gamer.

We've been moving all our code from Subversion to Git at work. As we've gone through this activity it made sense to split up some of the repositories to separate some of the source files more logically. Specifically what we wanted to do was move all of rarely updated library and utility type projects into a 'utils' repository while keeping the frequently updated projects in a 'main' repository. The catch was that we had to do this on a 'development' branch and we wanted to preserve the history of the projects that were being split into their own repository.

I tried to follow this article and the various comments left within it, but none of it seemed to work for me. That article naturally assumed that the master branch was being used. I've made some tweaks and came up with my own set of commands to do this that takes branches into account.

Objective: On branch 'dev', move directory 'LibProject1' from Git repository 'source-main' to 'source-utils' while preserving history of commits for that directory.
Assumption: Both source and target repositories have the same branch name set up. This is not a hard requirement and can be tweaked in the commands below but this is what I needed in my case.
 Git Details
Source Repository URL: [email protected]:user/source-main.git
Target Repository URL: [email protected]:user/source-utils.git
Branch: dev
Directory to move: LibProject1


Here is the first part, cloning the source repository and extracting just the directory you want to move...
 Git Commands
git clone [email protected]:user/source-main.git --branch dev --single-branch srcrepo
cd srcrepo
git remote rm origin
git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter LibProject1 -- --all
mkdir LibProject1
mv * LibProject1
git add .
git commit


At this point there is a Git repository that's been disconnected from the remote repository and contains just the directory that we're interested in moving.

We don't want to continue working in the source repository directory, so go up a directory...
 Git Commands
cd ..


Now comes the second part, cloning the target repository, creating a remote connection to the source as a branch and pulling in the contents of the branch before finally pushing the changes up to the target remote repository.
 Git Commands
git clone [email protected]:user/source-utils.git --branch dev --single-branch trgtrepo
cd trgtrepo
git remote add tmpbranch ../srcrepo
git pull tmpbranch dev
git remote rm tmpbranch
git push




That's pretty much it. Now the target repository has the contents and history of the directory you wanted moved over. The original directory can be deleted from the source repository at this stage, also the srcrepo and trgtrepo directories that were created during this process should now be removed as well.

-i


A quick disclaimer...

Although I put in a great effort into researching all the topics I cover, mistakes can happen. Use of any information from my blog posts should be at own risk and I do not hold any liability towards any information misuse or damages caused by following any of my posts.

All content and opinions expressed on this Blog are my own and do not represent the opinions of my employer (Oracle). Use of any information contained in this blog post/article is subject to this disclaimer.
Hi! You can search my blog here ⤵
NOTE: (2022) This Blog is no longer maintained and I will not be answering any emails or comments.

I am now focusing on Atari Gamer.