Situation: You have a repository with a subdirectory my/repo/part, which became large and own-project-worthy. You can copy the files into a new repo, but you’ll lose all git history.
What would be just perfect is: From all commits ever made in this repository, …
- only keep the parts of all commits which concern files under
./my/repo/part/** - remove the path prefix
./my/repo/part/.
So, basically, rewrite and filter all git commits.
There’s an app for that: git-filter-repo. And that’s how you use it:
# clone the repository parallel to the existing one
git clone git@github.com:me-and/my-repo fool-around-here
cd fool-around-here
# remove all other files except the ones you want
# (yup, it's that easy)
git-filter-repo --path my/repo/part
# move all files to the repository root
git-filter-repo --subdirectory-filter my/repo/part
# set a new origin URL
git remote set-url origin git@github.com:me-and/my-new-empty-prepared-repo
# push.
git push
The git history has been rewritten 1984-style. For git it has always been exactly like this now.