It is good practice for each project (within a directory) to be split out into its own repository?

Question

I am new to Git and am learning as much as I can about it.

The latest thing I would like to know is how to approach this problem: I have a single folder (R) that I initially set up as a Git repository.

Since setting R up, it now contains several projects and it is now the case that I have several branches, each reflecting a different project and I don't like it because it feels untidy and disorganised.

As such, I am thinking that the best way to approach the problem might be to create a new repository for each project. (Note that each project is a sub-directory of R.)

However, I know that creating a new repository means starting afresh (i.e. no branches or previous commits). Second - I'm sure the answer is yes - but I wonder if I can copy across a branch from R where I used to track changes previously so that I can continue with the new project as a repository as opposed to being a sub-directory of another repository.

So I have two questions:

1. Is it a good idea to split each project out into its own repository? (If so, will this affect the overall structure of R? The idea is that I stop using R as a repository and instead use R\Project1 and R\Project2, etc, as separate repositories.)
2. Is there a way to copy a branch from R into the new repository?

Note: I am the sole developer/user of these files at present - no others are involved.

Answer 1

1> NO - that is not GENERALLY a good idea (but maybe a good idea in some cases).

2> You can always clone a repository, and delete the unwanted branches.

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A good way to get a feel for appropriate git project layouts is to spend a few hours randomly wandering around github, and looking what other people do.

Generally, the guiding light on what makes sense to be in a single repository has very little todo with code organization - but lifetime of evolution. The one thing you want to avoid, is having to ever make changes that CROSS repository boundaries (can happen, but choose a structure where this is extremely unlikely).

And choose a structure where transitioning from alpha test, to beta, to release all will happen at the same time.

You can always COMPOSE repositories into larger chunks with sub-modules. But breaking them into smaller parts is harder (because of other teams/team member dependencies on the existing repository structure).

Answer 2

Answering question 1:

If this projects don't depend on each other just split them into separate repositories.

If they do depend on each other: split them and set them up using submodules. Or - if you have composing tools for your platform - use them.

Answer 3

1) If each project is a dependency of a larger project, I would not split them into separate repositories.

If you split a dependency into another repo, it will eventually get versioned, and the version used between dependant services will eventually diverge causing breaking changes.

You can take advantage of them being logically split into different folders for the majority of use cases. e.g. deploying them and scaling each "project" as a different service.

I feel that you should only split into multiple git repo's if you want to give different people access to different parts of the code, or if you wanted something like configuration in a separate repo, it really depends on your situation.

However, you say you are learning, the best thing to do is try it.

2) To split them into new repos, just move the folders out and init the repo. Then create the repo on github, and add the remote for each of these repositories. i.e.

mv ../old-repo/new-repo . 
cd new-repo 
git init 
git remote add origin [email protected]:User/UserRepo.git
git add -A
git commit -m "init"
git push origin master

Answer 4

Not a GIT expert, so this is a suggestion for someone else to jump on. Can the OP not create multiple iterations (branches?) of the repo, then turn those into "masters" (or whatever it's called), (and rename them and and boot the unnecessary stuff), so each repo would preserve all of the changes up until now, but be different in what they have deleted?