How to move a git repository to subdirectory of another repository

You might come across a situation when working with Git where you want to move a repository to another repository (i.e., make it a subdirectory of the other` repository) while maintaining its full history.

In this blog, I will be pointing out step by step with an example how to achieve that.

Use Case

Let us assume we have two repositories on git, repoA, and repoB, and we want to make repoB a subdirectory of repoA while maintaining its full history.

To achieve that we will move the content of repoB into a subfolder under repoB and then merge repoA and repoB. 

Bellow is the detailed git process:

1. The first step is to clone repoA and repoB on your machine

   $ git clone repoA $ git clone repoB

   Note: For the purpose of this blog I submitted a README.md file in each of the two repositories on Bitbucket. Below are two snapshots are taken for both repositories:

   RepoA:
   

   RepoB:
   

2. The second step is to copy the content of repoB to a subfolder. Go to the folder repoB and apply the following steps:
   • create a subfolder repoB
     

     $ mkdir repoB

   • move everything from the parent repoB to the child repoB (except the .git folder)
   • stage the files (the added folder and deleted file(s)) for a later commit
     

     $ git stage repoB/ $ git stage README.md

   • commit and push those changes to git

     $ git commit -am '[REPO-B] Move content to a subfolder' $ git push origin master

3. Go to the folder repoA and do the following:
   • add a remote branch with the content of repoB
     

     $ git remote add repoBTemp (path_to_repoB)

   • fetch repoBTemp the temp repo we created in the previous step
     

     $ git fetch repoBTemp

   • merge repoBTemp with repoA

     $ git merge repoBTemp/master

   • delete the remote repoBTemp

     $ git remote rm repoBTemp

   • push the changes to the server

     $ git push origin master

4. Now we can check our git history to verify that our trick worked as intended. In the right image below you can see that the history of repoB is now part of repoA’s history. In the left image, you can notice that repoB is now a subdirectory of repoA.

   

   

5. You it should be sage to delete the repository repoB

I hope you find this blog helpful!