Moving a folder between two git repos

I’m now in a new role with our Enterprise Architecture team and needed to move some of the work I maintained in my original team to my new team. This work was a folder inside of one of our repos and I wanted to turn it into it’s own repo. The library git-filter-repo was extremely helpful for this migration. Grégoire Welraeds’ post was also helpful.

Below are the steps I used to move those files while maintaining their history.

1. Install git-filter-repo

   pip install git-filter-repo

2. Create a clone of the source repo

   md sourceclone

   git clone <sourceclone.git> sourceclone

3. Break the connection to the source repo

   git reomte rm origin

4. Filter out what you want to keep in the destination repo

   git filter-repo --path <path to folder you want to move> --force

5. Create the destination folder

   md destination

6. Create the destination repo and clone it to your local machine

   git clone <desinationrepo.git> destination

   cd destination

7. Create a remote on the destination which points to the sourceclone

   git remote add sourceclone <path to sourceclone>

8. Fetch the source

   git fetch sourceclone

9. Create a branch to track the sourceclone from the remote main branch

   git branch sourceclone remotes/sourceclone/main

10. Merge the sourceclone main branch into the main branch of the destination

    git merge sourceclone --allow-unrelated-histories

11. Remove the remote sourceclone branch

    git remote rm sourceclone

12. Delete the local sourceclone branch

    git branch -d sourceclone

13. Push the changes to the destination main branch

    git push origin main

Now you have the source repo folder in your new repo. From here you can move files and folders around in the new repo as needed.

If you have questions, connect with me on twitter