In a few projects I worked with, the legacy code base were split into multple git repositories when they were interdependent. What I mean is that to compile the microservice deployable, you need to create the libraries contained in these multiple git repositories in a specific sequence. In addition, these libraries are not used anywhere except in the microservice. The worst culprit I encountered was a microservice that was split into six different git repositories – five Java libraries and one Java WAR file. It makes a developer’s life much easier if these six repositories are structured as a single Java maven multimodule project in a single git repository.
Obviously, you can just copy all the code to one directory and commit that. However, git allows you to copy the content from one repository into another, preserving the commit history at the same time. No one wants to lose all those change histories, right?
As an example, the code base for project x is split into three repositories called project-x-client, project-x-core and project-x-ws. You want to combine them all in project-x-ws, with each individual repository in a subdirectory. (This will later be converted into a maven submodule). After the migration, you want the code in project-x-client to be in a subdirectory called client under project-x-ws, project-x-core core, and project-x-ws in webservice.
First, you need to move all the files in project-x-core into a subdirectory called core. By doing this, when you copy all the files from this repository, the files will all be neatly located inside the directory core, instead of being under the root directory. We will use the master branch for the move.
cd /home/me/git-stuff/project-x-core
git checkout master
mkdir core
git mv src core
git mv README.md core
...
git commit -am "preparing project-x-core for migration"
You don’t need to push the change to remote. The copy can be done entirely using the local repository. To copy the project-x-core repository into project-x-ws:
cd /home/me/git-stuff/project-x-ws
git remote add r /home/me/git-stuff/project-x-core
git fetch r
git merge r/master --allow-unrelated-histories
git remote rm r
You have now pulled all the files and their commit histories into the existing repository for project-x-ws. Repeat this for client and ws. When you finish. push project-x-ws to remote to share this change with your team.