In the process of developing this blog on Github Pages, I’ve used and modified a Jekyll theme called Kiko Plus. That theme itself is a fork of the original Kiko theme, which is no longer maintained.

After forking Kiko Plus and making changes, I noticed that my fork still refers to the parent repo on Github. Things like pull requests, issues, etc will still be reflected against the parent repo, so I wanted to make a clean split. I also want to be able to pull request/merge my branches to my own repo instead of the parent.

This technique is called mirroring, and Github has documentation for it: Duplicating a repository

In addition, it would be nice to clean up all the old commits but keep my newer ones - to do that, I’ll rebase and squash the old ones into a single commit.

Mirror Forked Repo

The first step is to make a local bare clone of the existing Github Pages repo, and cd into it:

$ git clone --bare git@github.com:devedge/devedge.github.io.git && cd devedge.github.io.git

Next, create a new temporary repository in Github for the mirror: new-devedge.github.io

Push the bare clone up to the new temporary repository:

$ git push --mirror git@github.com:devedge/new-devedge.github.io.git

Delete the forked repository from Github (devedge.github.io), and rename the temporary repository to its name (new-devedge.github.io -> devedge.github.io)

Now the fork is an independent mirror!

Rebase Commits

There’s a lot of work done in the previous repo that I would like to compress down to one commit. To do this, let’s first rebase the entire repo history up to the first commit:

$ git rebase -i --root master

The interactive rebasing tool will open to your preferred terminal editor:

Reword the first commit, and prefix the remaining with fixup so they get squashed together without their commit messages.

After saving the changes, the rebase is ready to push. Force the push to ovewrite the remote origin:

$ git push --force

and now the repo history is consolidated.