Post: Create a new git repo from a subdirectory

I started a project (repo/) with a number of subdirectories:

repo/

web/

ingester/

bulkendpoint/

doc/

...

This worked fine in the beginning, but then I wanted to be able to branch, merge and deploy just the "web" subdirectory.

It took a good 10 minutes of man pages and googling to put the pieces together, but here is what worked for me:

#copy the whole repo.
cp -r repo newrepo
cd newrepo/

#remove reference to the old remote from the new repo.
git remote rm origin

#delete everything that isn't in the repo (including stuff in the .gitignore)
# this is optional, but nice to start clean!
git clean -f -d -x .

#this does most of the magic. will re-write your history!
git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter web/ -- --all

#the contents of web/ are now in the root of newrepo/
ls

#now, let's clean up all the references to old stuff in the newrepo/.git/ folder
rm -Rf .git/refs/original
rm -Rf .git/logs/
git reflog expire --expire=now --all
git gc --aggressive --prune=now

Now all you have to do is set up your new remote and push!

Create a new git repo from a subdirectory October 1, 2011