Moving sub-projects in Git

When I started this project I didn't actually know I was starting a project - it was going to be a template application for Vaadin 7, and the sandbox name I gave it was "V7".

I finally got round to changing the name, and decided to go through a major refactoring exercise at the same time.

I had a multi-project set up with a single Git repository and a master repo on Github.

Managing a multi-project set up is simple with the combination of Gradle, Git and IDEA that I use.  There's a Gradle plugin for Vaadin, too, to make life really easy. 

However, I decided I would separate sub-projects into their own repositories .. mainly to provide logical separation, but also because some of the experimental sub-projects will never be completed.

I wasn't looking forward to the task, thinking it would end up in some complex Git manipulation, but I was pleasantly surprised.  

The method described here, works extremely well - and it keeps your Git history.  The only issue I had was IDEA occasionally re-creating references to sub-projects that I had deleted - I'm not sure what was going on there, but I eventually cleared them.

The final step was to "promote" one remaining sub-project to become the main project, in the existing repo.  This again proved straightforward.  Git is quite happy for you move files around, or rename the local repo, as I did, as long as you don't modify the content of the files at the same time.

And finally, Github makes it really easy to change the name of your repo, even re-directing your original URL to the new one.

It makes a change for something you expect to be complicated to turn out to be easy ...