repo-merge.sh

A simple script to merge one Git repository into another by placing its contents into a subdirectory while preserving the entire commit history.

This is useful when consolidating multiple Git projects into a single repository, creating a monorepo, or just archiving your personal contributions across various projects.

Why?

Over time, I've accumulated many Git repositories across different projects and contexts. Some are personal experiments, others are contributions to various initiatives, and some are just old projects I want to keep around for reference.

The problem is that these repositories end up scattered across different locations - some on my local machine, some in cloud folders, some on different Git hosting services. They're not organized, not searchable, and over time I even forget what projects I worked on.

What I really want is to pull all those repositories into a single, well-organized Git repo. One folder per project, with all the commit history preserved. That way I can keep everything tidy in a single private repository that's easy to browse, search, and reference.

Thanks to services like GitHub, it's easy to store and secure private repositories. With this script, I can now consolidate everything cleanly and push it to a single private repo. For me, this is much better than having a scattered pile of backups floating around.

Here’s how I typically use it:

mkdir -p ~/acme

for repo in ~/work/*; do
  ./repo-merge.sh -s "$repo" -t ~/acme
done

The result is a single repository named acme, where each imported project has its own subdirectory and its full history.

Features

• Merges any Git repo into another
• Preserves the complete commit history
• Automatically detects the default branch (e.g. main, master)
• Minimal and portable (pure Bash)

Requirements

• git-filter-repo must be installed and available in your $PATH

# macOS
brew install git-filter-repo

# Manual (any OS)
curl -o /usr/local/bin/git-filter-repo https://raw.githubusercontent.com/newren/git-filter-repo/main/git-filter-repo
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/git-filter-repo

Usage

To merge one repository into another and place its contents in a subdirectory:

./repo-merge.sh --source <source_repo_path> --target <target_repo_path> [--dir <subdirectory>] [--verbose]