Merging unrelated histories

My website is built with Sculpin - a static site generator written in PHP.

It uses a some of the same Symfony components as Drupal, uses Twig for templating and YAML for configuration, and has similar features like content types and taxonomies for structuring content.

When I first created my website it was on Drupal 6 and upgraded to Drupal 7 before I started to take an interest in static site generators and later using Jekyll, Sculpin and Astro (and Sculpin, again).

I enjoyed learning Sculpin and took it as an opportunity to learn Twig before Drupal 8, which I spoke about in the first Sculpin talk I gave, at DrupalCamp North in July 2015.

I had three Git repositories, the current Sculpin one, the Astro version, and the original Sculpin version with its first commit in March 2015 - a few months before DrupalCamp North.

Static site generators keep the files in text files instead of a database, so I was wondering if it was possible to merge the repositories together and combine the information whilst keeping the same commit history so existing tags and contributions would still apply to the original commits.

In short, I was able to do it by adding the old repositories as additional remotes and using the --allow-unrelated-histories option for git merge.

After fixing some minor merge conflicts, everything was merged successfully and I have [one repository containing 5,272 all commits][2], going back to 2015.

This makes it older than my dotfiles repository, which I started in July 2015.

Similar to why I use Linux, I believe in owning your own content rather than relying on third-party platforms, so having all my content and history in one repository is great.

And I learned something new about Git at the same time.