Relocate the entire history of a Git repository

Goal

• Move all contents of a Git repository into a new subdirectory
• Apply the change on all commits in the entire history

Notes

• You can also just move the contents of the last commit in your repository. Git is able to follow moved contents in the history using git log --follow.
• This code moves the contents of every commit, so --follow is not needed anymore.
• However, this means that every commit will be changed. Old SHAs are no longer valid. Every clone of the repository needs to be cloned from start again.

How it works

• For every commit, create a new directory "html"
• Move everything into the new directory except ".git*" (includes ".gitignore") and "html" (otherwise a simple mv . html would do)

Code

git filter-branch --tree-filter 'mkdir html && find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 ! -name ".git*" ! -name "html" -exec mv {} html/ \;' HEAD