How to merge two or multiple git repositories into one

You never know if you need to combine two projects into one. If you ever want to, it should be fairly simple and straightforward to do it.

Use Cases:

• If there are two similar libraries and both of the maintainers come together to combine it.
• And sometimes, you don’t have a choice but to have a single repository for the project.

I have used Repo A and Repo B and Repo C for demonstrating the purpose.

• Repo A
• Repo B
• Repo C: This is the Repo C where I want to merge Repo A and Repo B.

Steps to merge git repositories

I assume you are in the directory, where you want to merge the repositories, for me, it is Repo C.

git remote add -f repo-a [email protected]:vaibhavmule/repo-a.git

This command will add a remote URL of repo-a.

git merge repo-a/master

Now the merging starts, it is as simple as merging any branch. This command will merge all the files and folders from repo-a/master.

fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories

Oops, in the real-world scenarios, it is not as simple as you think, you have to add —allow-unrelated-histories to actually getting it to work.

git merge repo-a/master --allow-unrelated-histories

By this time, you have successfully merged the master branch of repo-a to repo-c, for the reward you are ready to grab a coffee.

Wait, you might have got merge conflicts, resolve that and get your coffee.

Repeat same steps for Repo B,

git remote add -f repo-b [email protected]:vaibhavmule/repo-b.gitgit merge repo-b/master --allow-unrelated-histories

By this time, I was smarter and I knew that I’m going to get an error: fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories, so added allow-unrelated-histories beforehand.

I’m aware that I’m gonna get some merge conflicts, so, I resolved it.

You should  in your terminal, you will be able see commit history as expected.

Exercise for learning to merge two git repositories into one:

I’m from A and B in the README.md file, looks good. I thought of adding repo named mars, and README file would have contained I am from Mars.

But this is the exercise which you can do.

• Create a new repo named mars or it can be your city or country name.
• Merge mars repo to forked repo-c.
• Create the pull request to repo c.

You see, the merging of one or multiple repositories into single repositories is simple. In the process of merging repositories, only thing thats going to take time is merging conflicts.

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