How do I merge a sub directory in Git?

Question

Is it possible to merge only the changes for a sub-directory from a local Git branch to a remote Git branch or is it "all or nothing"?

For example, I have:<

Answer 1

For my example, assume you have a branch 'source' and a branch 'destination' which both reflect upstream versions of themselves (or not, if local only) and are pulled to the latest code. Let's say I want the subdirectory in the repository called newFeature which only exists in the 'source' branch.

git checkout destination
git checkout source newFeature/
git commit -am "Merged the new feature from source to destination branch."
git pull --rebase
git push

It is significantly less convoluted than everything else I've seen and this worked perfectly for me, found here.

Note that this isn't a 'real merge', so you won't have the commit information about newFeature in the destination branch, just the modifications to the files in that subdirectory. But since you're presumably going to merge the entire branch back over later, or discard it, that might not be an issue.