I have a rather large git repository that has a directory where I maintain library code. The directory contains a number of subdirectories.
repo
+--- lib
| +--- A
| +--- B
...
| +--- Z
Now let us assume that I want to open source subdirectories A,...,M
and keep subdirectories N,...,Z
close sourced. Let us also assume that I would like to:
- Keep
A,...,M
in a single open source repository. The reason for this is that the directoriesA,...,M
have interdependencies and it would be confusing to split them into individual repositories. - Keep the structure of my closed source repository intact. For example, I could create subdirectories
lib/pub
andlib/pvt
, but this would have cascading effects requiring changing references elsewhere or would require a lot of symlinks (lib/A -> lib/pub/A
). - Have a solution akin to
git subtree
where I can modify code either in my closed source repository or in the open source one and I can easily sync the changes between the two repositories.
I have searched for a solution in both stackoverflow and google, but there does not seem to be an obvious one. Conceptually this is something that git subtree
should be able to do, but it only works with a single subdirectory.
I have looked into the git-subtree
script with the intent of modifying it.
https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/contrib/subtree/git-subtree.sh
It appears to me that if I was to modify subtree_for_commit()
I should be able to convince git subtree split
to consider more than a single directory for splitting. But my knowledge of git is not enough to understand what the script is doing and modify it without breaking things.
If you have any solution for the above mentioned problem or any other pointers in modifying git-subtree
, please let me know.
Here is a shell script based on
git subtree
, it is much faster than solutions which are based ongit filter-branch --tree-filter
; its side effect is several extragit mv
andgit merge
commits will be generated and added to finalHEAD
. If you feel ok of these extra empty commits, you can try:When you have both subdirectories and files in a directory src you want to split into a separate repository that later becomes a submodule, there were not many answers. Suppose you want dir2 and file2 moved to a new repo srcpublic then in the original repo,
git mv src/file2 src/dir2; git subtree split -P dir2 -b branch_dir2
In the new repo, subtree pull /dir2 branch_dir2; git mv dir2/file2 ../
New repo: srcpublic - file2, dir2
Original repo: src - file1, file2, dir1, dir2
When there are dozens of folders and files, it helps to put the commands in a script.
Splitting a subtree mixed with files from the parent project
This seems to be a common request, however I don't think there's a simple answer, when the folders are mixed together like that.
The general method I suggest to split out the library mixed in with other folders is this:
Make a branch with the new root for the library directories:
Then use something to re-write history to remove the parts that aren't part of the library. I'm not expert on this but I was able to experiment and found something like this to work:
Note: You might need to delete the back-up made by filter-branch if you make successive commands.
Lastly, just create a new repo for the library and pull in everything that's left:
Use
git subtree add
See Git subtree split two directories, I think you may use that technique for more than two directories, even for multiple repos, i.e.