git subtree: How to extract some file paths into a separate into a separate branch in git
Let’s say you have a git directory just having one master or main branch. Or, you have a certain directory or a file path that you want to be separated into a separate branch.
When would this happen? I’ve observed that a customer was trying to migrate form Team Foundation Server (TFS) where they could clone using git tfs command but end up aggregating clone everything as one branch — master. There are few options in git tfs where you can convert TFS “branches” there to git branches, but there were some limitations there. Easiest option was to convert everything, even branches, as folders, but you may still want to separate those folders into separate branches when you push to git platform like GitHub. What do you do?
Enter git subtree . This command will help to split certain folder/file path into own branch.
I created a very simple git directory like this using git init command. Yours might be more complicated.
Ad you can see there are two folders SRC and IMAGES, and there are some files in root and folders underneath. Now, let’s assume that we want to take out that SRC directory into another branch. Here is my current git log look like.
