Remove history for everything except a list of files using git filter-branch

Question

I\'m trying to move some files between two git repositories repo1 and repo2. I have a short list of files I\'d like to move (preserving history).

Answer 1

With Git 2.24 (Q4 2019), git filter-branch is deprecated.

The equivalent would be, using newren/git-filter-repo, and its example section:

If you have a long list of files, directories, globs, or regular expressions to filter on, you can stick them in a file and use --paths-from-file; for example, with a file named stuff-i-want.txt with contents of

README.md
guides/
tools/releases
glob:*.py
regex:^.*/.*/[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}.txt$
tools/==>scripts/
regex:(.*)/([^/]*)/([^/]*)\.text$==>\2/\1/\3.txt

then you could run

git filter-repo --paths-from-file stuff-i-want.txt

In your case, stuff-i-want.txt would be:

libraryname/file1
libraryname/file2
tests/libraryname/file3

---

As kubanczyk points out in the comments:

Works well on Ubuntu 20.04, you can just pip3 install git-filter-repo since it's stdlib-only and doesn't install any dependencies.

On Ubuntu 18 it's incompatible with distro's git version, but it's easy to enough to run it on a docker run -ti ubuntu:20.04