A new Git repository from an existing one

I have a git repository called Playground in which I push all kinds of ideas and tinker results without further concepts. But every now and then things evolve and then I like to create a new dedicated repository with only the changes realted to the project. In the following a list the possible results to achieve this.

Option 1

I found the following all in one solution on stackoverflow

$ git --git-dir=../<some_other_repo>/.git format-patch -k -1 --stdout <commit SHA> | git am -3 -k

The nice thing about the above command is that we save the detour of involving a git server, it’s enough to have both repositories on the local disk.

Option 2

This solution is basically identical to the first option, but makes every step more explicit. Note that below solution works on a range of commits. This range is exactly the commits I was interested in

$ git format-patch <SHA_A>..<SHA_B> -o patches
$ cp -r patches path/to/fresh/repository
$ cd path/to/fresh/repository
$ git init
$ git am patches/*
$ rm -r patches

Changing directory layout

I use the one Playground repository for all of my programming languages. Every language has a separate folder and in these folders typically every new attempt has its own subfolder.

This kind of folder hierarchy is most certainly not what I want in a dedicated repository. But the git am command preserves the folder hierarchy of the original patch source. Thus we have to rewrite the folder hierarchy. Git typically refers to the folder hierarchy as the “tree”, which can be manipulated via the git filter-branch command

$ tree
.
├── file1
├── file2
├── folder1
│   └── file3
└── folder2
    └── file4
$ git filter-branch --force --tree-filter 'mv folder1/* .'
$ git filter-branch --force --tree-filter 'mv folder2/* .'
$ tree
.
├── file1
├── file2
├── file3
└── file4

The above command sequence demonstrates how to flatten an existing folder structure, thus allowing to hide the original hierarchy.