splitting git repo
split a subdirectory into a new repo (simple case)
git clone --no-hardlinks --branch master originalRepoURL childRepo
cd childRepo
git filter-branch --prune-empty --subdirectory-filter path/to/keep master
git remote remove origin
git prune
git gc --aggressive
Change originalRepoURL, master, and path/to/keep to appropriate values. Use -- --all to handle all branches.
split a subdirectory into a new repo (complex case)
In case you have multiple paths you want to filter, you need to use --index-filter together with GNU xargs and GNU sed available via brew install gnu-sed findutils.
git clone --no-hardlinks --branch master originalRepoURL childRepo
cd childRepo
git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm --cached -qr --ignore-unmatch -- . && git reset -q $GIT_COMMIT -- path1/to/keep path2/to/keep' --prune-empty master
git filter-branch --prune-empty --parent-filter 'gsed "s/-p //g" | gxargs git show-branch --independent | gsed "s/\</-p /g"'
git remote remove origin
git prune
git gc --aggressive
Change originalRepoURL, master, path1/to/keep, path2/to/keep to appropriate values. Use -- --all to handle all branches.
move src back to path/to/keep
--subdirectory-filter moves the path of src/ etc under path/to/keep to root, so if you need to add a commit to move it back to the same (or another) path.
mkdir -p path/to/keep
git mv src path/to/keep
git commit -m "move files"
delete tags
To remove tags from the original repo, save the following as deltags.sh, and run it.
#!/bin/bash
for t in `git tag`
do
git tag -d $t
done
chmod +x deltags.sh
./deltags.sh
merge it to an existing repo
Optionally, this technique can be used to graft a history into an existing repo.
To be safe, let’s do that in a branch called wip/graft.
cd ..
git clone someotherRepo
cd someotherRepo
git remote add childRepo ../childRepo
git checkout -b wip/graft
git pull childRepo master --allow-unrelated-histories
git remote remove childRepo
This way you can send this as a pull request etc.