Jake Wharton

My SVN repository for SMSBarrage had a root directory structure like this:

SMSBarrage/
 +-trunk/
    +-Android\
    +-Blackberry\
    +-iPhone\
    +-WindowsMoblie\

After importing this structure into a Git repository I realized that I wanted to break it up into multiple repositories. I had already deleted the SMSBarrage/ folder from the SVN and I didn’t want to deal with rolling back the commit. Luckily git has a very impressive command toolkit which enabled me to make this transition without losing any code, history, or even tags.

First, I cloned the repository four times into separate folders:

projects/
 +-smsbarrage-android\
    +-Android\
    +-Blackberry\
    +-iPhone\
    +-WindowsMoblie\
 +-smsbarrage-blackberry\
    +-...
 +-smsbarrage-iphone\
    +-...
 +-smsbarrage-windowsmobile\
    +-...

Then in each root folder execute the following to make all the content of the child folder (including revision history) the new HEAD.

$ git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter Android/ -- --all

(Change Android/ to the associated folder.)

Finally, change the remote repository URL for each and push the new master.

$ git remote rm origin
$ git remote add origin git@github.com:JakeWharton/smsbarrage-android.git
$ git push origin master

(Change smsbarrage-android to the associated remote repository.)

Now all you have to do is delete the initial git repository and you’ll be left with multiple individual repositories for each sub-folder. Each one contains history that was only specific to its sub-folder from the original repository.