Move a git directory

I was working on a project, made some progress, commited a bunch of code into github and all was well. The code eventually needed to go into another repo so the painful merge adventure began… man… That took a bit of research.

I did what I do best and googled the hell out of it… There were lots of solutions but some of them weren’t really clear to me or just didn’t work. So after mindlessly trying out solutions, I realized I had to actually think of one.

Table of contents

• Table of contents
• What’s the plan?
• Why did I write this?
• Let’s do this!
  • Set up your working directory
  • Move everything into a directory
  • Prepare the code
  • Add a remote branch
  • Merge the branch
  • Remove the temp branch
  • Check results
  • Move to new location

What’s the plan?

Take the contents of a repo and put it inside a particular folder in an existing repository and at the same time preserve the history.

Why did I write this?

In an effort to save myself some future research… And maybe someone else needs this info.

If you have a better solution, let me know!

Let’s do this!

Set up your working directory

Clone repos

Set up a separate area and clone both the original repository Orig – which contains the files you want to copy – and the target repository Dest. This way, you can delete and restart if something goes wrong. Don’t push changes unless you’re really sure.

$ mkdir TestFolder
$ cd TestFolder
$ git clone Orig.git
$ git clone Dest.git

Result

|-- TestFolder
	|-- Orig
		|-- .git
		|-- .gitignore
		|-- File 
		|-- Dir 
	|-- Dest
		|-- .git
		|-- File
		|-- File

Move everything into a directory

Create a new folder

Create a new folder – in this example, I named it temp – inside the repo Orig and move everything except the .git folder into it. Make sure that the folder name you choose doesn’t exist in the root of the repo Dest to avoid issues and conflicts.

$ cd /TestFolder/Orig
$ mkdir temp
$ mv !(temp) temp
$ mv .gitignore temp 	# Manually move files that are remaining

Result

|-- TestFolder
	|-- Orig
		|-- .git
		|-- temp
			|-- .gitignore
			|-- File 
			|-- Dir
	|-- Dest
		|-- .git
		|-- File
		|-- File

Prepare the code

Commit the code but DO NOT PUSH!!! You don’t want to modify the origin.

$ git add -A .		# The next line doesn't commit if this line is not there
$ git commit -a -m "Moved all data into temp folder"

Add a remote branch

Go to Dest and add temp as a remote branch.

$ cd /TestFolder/Dest
$ git remote add temp /TestFolder/Orig
$ git fetch temp

Merge the branch

Merge the remote branch into Dest.

$ git merge -m "Merging into repo Dest" temp/master

Remove the temp branch

Remove the temp remote branch from Repo Dest.

$ git remote rm temp

Check results

You should now have the folder temp in the root of Repo Target

|-- TestFolder
	|-- Orig
		|-- .git
		|-- temp
			|-- .gitignore
			|-- File
			|-- Dir
	|-- Dest
		|-- .git
		|-- File
		|-- File
		|-- temp  	# This is the new folder
			|-- .gitignore
			|-- File
			|-- Dir

And… if you look at the git logs, you’ll see that the history is there. Yay!

Move to new location

Now, you can move the contents of temp anywhere in Dest. You’re done! Commit and push!