How do I Re-root a git repo to a parent folder while preserving history?

Question

I have a git repo in /foo/bar/baz with a large commit history and multiple branches.

I now want /foo/qux to be in the same repo as /f

Answer 1

Most common solution

In most normal situations, git looks at all files relatively to its location (meaning the .git directory), as opposed to using absolute file paths.

Thus, if you don't mind having a commit in your history which shows that you have moved everything up, there is a very simple solution, which consists in moving the git directory. The only slightly tricky thing is to make sure git understands that the files are the same and that they only moved relatively to him :

# Create sub-directory with the same name in /foo/bar
mkdir bar

# Move everything down, notifying git :
git mv file1 file2 file3 bar/

# Then move everything up one level :
mv .git ../.git
mv bar/* .
mv .gitignore ../

# Here, take care to move untracked files

# Then delete unused directory
rmdir bar

# and commit
cd ../
git commit

The only thing to be careful, is to correctly update .gitignore when moving to the new directory, to avoid staging unwanted files, or forgetting some.

Bonus solution

In some settings, git manages to figure out by itself that files have been moved when it sees new files that are exactly the same as deleted files. In that case, the solution is even simpler :

mv .git ../.git
mv .gitignore ../.gitignore

cd ../
git commit

Again, be careful with your .gitignore