Pull from another repository without history using Git

PullWithoutHistoryInGit.md

Pull from another repository without history using Git

Ok, so lets contextualize ourselves

• Let's say you have a main repo A which could be an open source project or a company project
• Project A served as blueprint for your next project, B. So you either forked or cloned A and removed the .git folder to have a clean git history
• You start working on project B as you would normally do

Now... at some point A changes and you want to pull those changes to B without getting the entire commit history. Maybe there's only 1 commit, maybe there's thousands.

Here's what you can do.

Open up a terminal and follow the steps:

# cd into your repo and change to the branch you want to merge the pull the changes into
$ git remote add <remote_alias> <remote_url>
$ git pull <remote_alias> <name_of_the_branch> --allow-unrelated-histories --no-tags
$ git reset HEAD

# Solve any conflicts
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Your message here"

# Check your log to verify. You should see only the project B commits
$ git log

You could remove the added remote

$ git remote remove <remote_alias>

You can run the following command to check for any local undesired tags

$ git tag
$ git tag --delete <tag_name>