Splitting a project sub-directory to a new Git repo

Recently I realized that a sub-directory in a Git project would be better as an independent project. Luckily this is such a common need, Git has a nice command to make this easy called subtree split. It creates a new branch in the project, with only the commits that involved the specified sub-directory.

Let’s say you have a project with a sub-directory called plugins/media and you want that in an independent repository:

git subtree split -P plugins/media -b media

This will put all commits related to plugins/media in a new branch named media. You can confirm the result with git log media.

Next, create the target repository, for example on GitHub, or locally:

git init --bare /tmp/proj-media.git

Create a remote for the repository, add a remote for it, and push the media branch to the remote with the name master:

git remote add proj-media /tmp/proj-media.git
git push proj-media media:master

Note that the original repository is unchanged: the plugins/media directory still exists, untouched. Most probably you want to replace the directory with the new project as a submodule:

git rm -r plugins/media
git submodule add url_to_repo plugins/media
git commit -m 'replaced plugins/media with a submodule'

For more on submodules, see this chapter in the Pro Git book:

http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Tools-Submodules

Splitting a project sub-directory to a new Git repo —12 August 2014