How do you merge two Git repositories?

Question

Consider the following scenario:

I have developed a small experimental project A in its own Git repo. It has now matured, and I'd like A to be part of larger project B, which has its own big repository. I'd now like to add A as a subdirectory of B.

How do I merge A into B, without losing history on any side?

Answer 1

Given command is the best possible solution I suggest.

git subtree add --prefix=MY_PROJECT git://github.com/project/my_project.git master

Answer 2

Similar to @Smar but uses file system paths, set in PRIMARY and SECONDARY:

PRIMARY=~/Code/project1
SECONDARY=~/Code/project2
cd $PRIMARY
git remote add test $SECONDARY && git fetch test
git merge test/master

Then you manually merge.

(adapted from post by Anar Manafov)

Answer 3

If both repositories have same kind of files (like two Rails repositories for different projects), you can fetch data of the secondary repository to your current repository:

git fetch git://repository.url/repo.git master:branch_name

and then merge it to current repository:

git merge --allow-unrelated-histories branch_name

If your Git version is smaller than 2.9, remove --allow-unrelated-histories.

After this, conflicts may occur. You can resolve them for example with git mergetool. kdiff3 can be used solely with keyboard, so 5 conflict file takes when reading the code just few minutes.

Remember to finish the merge:

git commit

Answer 4

When you want to merge three or more projects in a single commit, do the steps as described in the other answers (remote add -f, merge). Then, (soft) reset the index to old head (where no merge happened). Add all files (git add -A) and commit them (message "Merging projects A, B, C, and D into one project). This is now the commit-id of master.

Now, create .git/info/grafts with following content:

<commit-id of master> <list of commit ids of all parents>

Run git filter-branch -- head^..head head^2..head head^3..head. If you have more than three branches, just add as much head^n..head as you have branches. To update tags, append --tag-name-filter cat. Do not always add that, because this might cause a rewrite of some commits. For details see man page of filter-branch, search for "grafts".

Now, your last commit has the right parents associated.