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QuakerOat
QuakerOat

Reputation: 1143

Git - how best to store multiple repositories inside one master repository?

I am moving a lot of projects into private repositories in GitHub. A lot of these are projects that are no longer actively in use. As such, I'd rather not have a dedicated repository per each of these projects - I'd like to lump them all into one 'Deprecated Projects' repository. I would like to do this and maintain the history of each individual project.

I've tried just placing the project directories, along with their .git directories, into the main Deprecated Projects repository, but this doesn't seem to work - only the directory actually seems to get tracked/versioned in the main repository, but none of it's files.

What is the best option available to me in this situation? I have tried renaming the .git directories in the sub-directories / projects to .git-directory, and this seems as though it removes the problem - all the files in the projects get added to the main repository correctly. If this does indeed work exactly as I want, then this would be an acceptable solution - just having to rename the .git-directory folder to .git if I did want to move the project out of the 'Deprecated Repositories' repo, and start active development on it again. If anybody can confirm whether this approach is okay, or is likely to result in problems, that would be very useful.

I'm pretty new, so any information on this would be greatly appreciated!

Upvotes: 3

Views: 772

Answers (1)

Dietrich Epp
Dietrich Epp

Reputation: 213777

Use subtree merging.

Summary

Subtree merging allows you keep the history of every project, and the latest commit will have each project in a separate directory. This is ideal if all the projects are inactive.

You can brows the history in gitk as normal, and the SHA-1 hashes are preserved.

Mechanics

Suppose you have the master repo in master-repo and the project to merge in project. Here are the steps:

cd master-repo
git remote add project1 ../project1
git fetch project1
git merge -s ours --no-commit project1/master
git read-tree --prefix=project1 -u project1/master
git commit -m "Added project 1"

In other words,

  1. Add the project as a remote, so you can bring the history in to the master repository.
  2. Merge the project into your master repository, but use a merge strategy which completely ignores files from the project. This allows you to make a merge commit without actually changing any files, which allows you to explore history later.
  3. Bring in the project files into a subdirectory, and commit.

Note, by itself, this will not preserve branches from the projects other than "master". You can preserve them by putting them in other subdirectories, or you can skip the read-tree step and just make merge commits without actually bringing in files from those branches.

Upvotes: 2

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