When moving files/directories around in a git repo, the version history of the file gets lost! Let’s fix that.

While working on my vSummary github repo, I came to a point where I had decided to change the folder structure of it. At this point I had about 60-ish commits to it. So I began by using the git mv command to move and rename directories then finished off with the usual commit and push commands. However, when I took a look at some of the individual files in the repo I noticed that the commit history for them were gone. While github still had all my commits, the history for individual files/directories seemed to have been erased with the restructuring commit. I did not expect that, but according to github, this is the expected behaviour: Why does github not track renames

Fortunately, I was able to fix this by rolling back my latest commit and using this script to preserve the history of my restructuring:

Once you are finished with your history rewrites, you can force a push like: git push origin master --force