Git pull into an untracked copy of repo

Question

So in an ideal world, when I started this project, I would have cloned from a source, and then committed all my changes to this repo. When the main project was updated, I could pull those changes into my repo. (This is one way traffic, no pushing going on.)

However, when I started, I did not clone, but simply downloaded a released ZIP of the code, unzipped it, and then did a git init. I have since committed all my changes to this copy of the code. However, the main codebase has now been updated, but as my copy is not a merge, but my own repo of the same base code, I cannot merge the master's changes into mine.

Is there any way of getting these changes from the main code into my repo without having to start again?

Answer 1

You can fix your repository by rebasing the changes of your private repository on top of the remote changes.

• add a new remote to your repository containing the correct remote git URL.
• fetch from that remote to fetch all the correct remote commits to your own repository
• use git rebase to transplant you commits on top of the remote commits.
• merge your branch into the remote one.

This would be something like:

cd $your_git_repository
git remote add origin $URL
git fetch origin
git branch -m my_branch
git rebase --onto $base_commit $your_first_commit my_branch
git merge $remote_branch
git log --graph --decorate --oneline

where $base_commit is the commit corresponding to the zip you downloaded in the first place, and $your_first_commit is the commit you commited the extracted zip file as.

Answer 2

Simplest way - clone the latest version of code into, say folderA. Say you were working in the unzipped source in folderB. Copy folderB contents into folderA. Commit the changes. Push!

Answer 3

You can also do, assuming you are on branch master:

git remote add origin
git pull --allow-unrelated-histories origin master

And then merge the two repos.

If you have more branches, use git merge with the same --allow-unrelated-histories flag

• Flag added in git 2.9
• More info in the docs