Overview
I often find myself developing code for a project which over the course of the job turns out to be a useful general library which I'd like to use for other projects. Rather than copy/pasting this code to a new folder and starting a fresh Git repository, I'll want to take the commit history for that library and its subfolders, and start with that.
Based on this Stack Overflow post, there are a couple of approaches to do that:
- Extract only the folder and subfolders
- Extract the full path (if you have a root folder structure you want to keep)
For now I'm going to demonstrate the first.
There's a lot of complicated sounding information out there, which often assumes you know what you're doing on the git command line (which I don't) so:
- I'll use an actual project to illustrate how this is done
- I'll break it down in super-easy steps, with full code output, so you can see what's happening
- I'll highlight the code you type in red
- I'll underline the names of folders and repositories to make it clear what you should swap out for your own values, and what's just a git command
Note that this was done on a mac, so the paths are normal, absolute paths.
- Windows users, use the standard path syntax for Windows, c:/path/to/files
- All users, use quotes for pathnames with spaces: "c:/path/to/some folder/with lots of files"
Technique 1: Extract only folder and subfolders
Overview
This technique results in a brand new repo, with the subfolder contents in the root:
+- original +- some-lib
+- blah +- ClassA
+- libs +- ClassB
+- lib1 +- ClassC
+- lib2
+- lib3 ->
+- ClassA
+- ClassB
+- ClassC
This is useful in languages like PHP, when extracting a library to use with Composer, as Composer recreates the intermediate namespacing folders (e.g. davestewart/some-lib/) when you require the package from Packagist.
We use git subtree split to copy the folder into a new branch in the original repo, which you then pull into a new repo.
Code
To start, we'll create a temporary branch in your original project repo.
Go to the original repo's folder (path/to/original-repo) and split the library subfolder (path/to/lib-folder) into a new branch (some-lib):
$ cd /path/to/original-repo $ git subtree split -P path/to/lib-folder -b some-lib Created branch 'some-lib' f4b2b26a2681b71cfdbb71cd24fb09a9a9626e66
Next, we'll make a new repo and pull in the temporary branch.
Create and initialize a new repo (/path/to/new-repo):
$ mkdir /path/to/new-repo $ cd /path/to/new-repo $ git init Initialized empty Git repository in /path/to/new-repo/.git/
The final step is to grab the branch you created a moment ago.
From the new repo (current folder) pull the newly-created branch (some-lib) from the original repo (/path/to/original-repo):
$ git pull /path/to/original-repo some-lib
remote: Counting objects: 235, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (217/217), done.
remote: Total 235 (delta 90), reused 16 (delta 3)
Receiving objects: 100% (235/235), 61.53 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (90/90), done.
From /path/to/original-repo
* branch crud-lib -> FETCH_HEAD
Do a quick file listing, just to see if it's worked:
$ ls -l
total 536
drwxr-xr-x@ 1 Dave staff 189B 30 Mar 17:14 docs/
drwxr-xr-x@ 1 Dave staff 756B 30 Mar 17:14 src/
drwxr-xr-x@ 1 Dave staff 504B 30 Mar 17:14 views/
You can check the logs as well, just to see that it is only the commit history from this folder:
$ git shortlog
Dave Stewart (37):
Moved crud helper files to their own namespace
Moved local packages around
Major rewrite of CrudHelper to CrudService
Updated CrudService with explicit getters and additional flexibility to set values and use the class flexibly
Various improvements and optimisations on CrudService package
Minor updates to crud view data structures
Various minor Crud updates
Various improvements to CRUD views and structure, and moved Entity Controllers to controllers/entities folder
Added proper index redirecting
Moved all querying to internal query builder, broke out call() and query() methods, added filter() method, added magic properties and method calls
Updated CrudService to work with updated CrudRepo
Updated CrudMeta behaviour for index pages
Separated CrudRepo functionality into standalone methods, as well as various other tidy ups and comments
Added robust CrudMeta getter and setter methods
Made CrudService::index() method internals more readable
Moved CrudMethods trait to traits subfolder
Converted CrudRepo interface to base class, and made some minor code optimisations in EloquentRepo
Added control() helper to CrudServiceProvider
Various major optimisations to CrudService, CrudMata and CrudField
Added CrudControl and FormControl classes
Added new exception class
Added field-centric validation messages
Moved all field-generation functionality to CrudMetaService
Moved and minor updates to CrudService
Minor bug fixes to CrudMeta/CrudMetaService refactor
Added back rules, and added required class to control classes
Moved stub view files
Renamed CRUD validation messages file
Added confirmation messages to crud messages
First iteration of CrudValidator
Updated language files
Added basics of translation service
Reorganised CrudMeta and removed status / language functionality
Found cleaner way for CrudValidator to display proper messages
Various major improvements in fields and controls to add more flexibility and functionality
Moved loadRelated() functionality from CrudService to CrudRepo
Various improvements to CrudMetaService
That's all there is to it 🙂
If you're writing PHP, and still developing your package, see this post to see how to use Composer to manage and include your new package whilst at the same time continuing local development on it.
Technique 2: Extract folder and subfolders
Overview
This technique results in a brand new repo, with the the entire, filtered subtree in the root:
+- original +- some-lib
+- blah +- libs
+- libs +- lib3
+- lib1 +- ClassA
+- lib2 +- ClassB
+- lib3 -> +- ClassC
+- ClassA
+- ClassB
+- ClassC
This is useful for languages like ActionScript, where you need the full folder structure in order to find the classes by folder.
Code
I'll cover this at some point, but in the meantime, look at the second option covered in the Stack Overflow link below.
Links
I used the following resources to compile this post: