Clean git repo (except .git folder)

Clean git repo and replace its contents

This is one of the common tasks I have to perform often. For example, this new blog is set up with Astro and I had to replace the previous gatsby setup with astro files without affecting the git history.

You can list all the files to be deleted in the git repo with the command

find . -mindepth 1 -not -regex "^\./\.git.*"

If you are satisfied with the results, you can append -delete to the above command like so

find . -mindepth 1 -not -regex "^\./\.git.*" -delete

This works for me in macos and this may not work in certain *nix systems.

Now, we have all the files cleaned up without touching .git folder, so our git history remains intact. We can commit the current state and move on to next step to replace the folder with new contents. I usually have the files to be replaced in a separate folder. I just run from the current folder

cp -a ./path-to/my-folder-with-new-files/. .

This just replaces all the contents without losing my git history.

PS: One of the main reasons behind this blog is to document these seemingly silly stuffs that I can refer to later.

Have a nice day!