git: put a branch in a subdirectory

Question

I have a git repository (at github.com) with two branches: master and gh-pages. I would like to have the gh-pages branch in a subdirectory, so that I don't need to switch branches every time.

repo/
    (content of the master branch)
    gh-pages/
            (content of the gh-pages branch)

Is that possible ?

It is usually simpler to use a separate repository, but you might find git.git’s [contrib/workdir/git-new-workdir](http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=blob;f=contrib/workdir/git-new-workdir;h=75e8b258177f7f04dadcac125f2bf7ebea4d0f81;hb=HEAD) useful. — Chris Johnsen, Feb 23 '11 at 05:37
an actual direct answer to the question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4750520/git-branch-gh-pages/4993758#4993758 — cregox, Mar 24 '11 at 15:00

score 26 · Answer 1 · edited Aug 28 '22 at 07:03

26

You may be looking for the subtree merging option.

It will let you checkout an unrelated branch into a subdirectory of another and then merge back and forth between them. You would still have to checkout gh-pages and merge in changes from the main repo before pushes would go live on GitHub, however.

You could also check gh-pages out as a submodule of your master branch if that suits you better.

edited Aug 28 '22 at 07:03

Konrad Pettersson

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answered Mar 06 '10 at 00:48

Scott Chacon

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FWIW, this is the one that ought to be accepted as the correct answer. – Ben Collins Mar 06 '10 at 00:51
Your last line makes a GREAT deal of sense. Thanks for the excellent tip! – Andrew Christianson Nov 30 '15 at 02:31
The link does not seem to work anymore, it is redirected to http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2 now. – luator Jun 08 '22 at 13:38

koppor · Answer 2 · 2022-06-09T22:29:44.660

You can have both branches checked out at the same time in different directories.

Setup:

git worktree add -b gh-pages ../gh-pages origin/gh-pages

Then,

you have in . the master branch and in ../gh-pages the branch gh-pages.
you can work in both directories with the usual git pull and git push actions
you save disk space, because the clone is stored once (and not twice)
you can switch branches at each of the directories. Only constaint: The checked out branches must be different at each time. Meaning, you cannot have patch-1 checked out in both directories.

Notes:

See https://github.com/blog/2042-git-2-5-including-multiple-worktrees-and-triangular-workflows.
You can publish the contents of gh-pages using GitHub Ations. See actions-gh-pages for details.
(from 2017): If you want to have the content of a subdirectory of your master checkout to be put into gh-pages on github, use the script provided at https://github.com/X1011/git-directory-deploy.

There way too many files in that directory, how can I use it? Should I just copy the `deploy.sh` file? — fiatjaf, Jan 03 '17 at 13:08
Yes, only `deploy.sh`. See below the heading **configuration** in the provided README.md file: https://github.com/X1011/git-directory-deploy#configuration — koppor, Jan 18 '17 at 07:07

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 05 '10 at 12:36

That's not how things are designed to work. You could theoretically clone the repository within a subdirectory of your original clone and mark that directory as excluded from the higher level repository, but wouldn't it be much simpler to just check it out in a completely different directory instead of a subdirectory?

That is to say...

/repo/master/(clone on master branch)

and then another clone that's on the other branch

/repo/gh-pages/(clone on gh-pages branch)

Dan Moulding · Answer 4 · 2010-03-05T13:02:00.023

Generally with version control it's not a good idea to combine multiple projects into a single repository. For instance, what if someone would like to fork your repository, but not host their copy at GitHub? Then the gh-pages directory would be completely useless to them. Even if they did host theirs at GitHub, the gh-pages directory could very well still be irrelevant to them.

I realize that the GitHub way of doing this goes against this advice, somewhat (after all, even though they are on different branches, they're still in the same repo). However, the branches in this case are completely unrelated (they don't share any history) so from a practical perspective, it's as if they were in separate repositories. If someone clones your repo and doesn't want the gh-pages branch, they can delete it and it will have zero effect on master.

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Jan 11 '17 at 11:05

I've tried the git subtree trick, but it requires that master have all the gh-pages content committed to it, which is not ideal in this case. Much better and simpler is to

Create a new directory at ./repo/gh-pages/
Put a line on .gitignore for that (gh-pages)
cd gh-pages/, git init and git checkout -b gh-pages, creating an independent git remote there

You can also git clone directly to ./gh-pages/ with only the branch you want.

score -3 · Answer 6 · answered Mar 05 '10 at 13:06

-3

Branches in git are pointers to commits (that move), and so having a branch as a subdirectory is not possible.

To be fair, git co gh-pages is not much harder than cd ../gh-pages

answered Mar 05 '10 at 13:06

lprsd

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It's not about being harder, but having both there at the same time. It's perfectly reasonable to have a gh-pages branch that is completely disjoint from master, and so convenient to have them side by side to move files. – Jan Segre Sep 13 '15 at 17:42

git: put a branch in a subdirectory

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