Intro

Recently I have been challenged with the task of merging an existing repository into a Turborepo monorepo. This is a common task when migrating to a monorepo, and it can be a bit tricky if you are not familiar with the process. In this article, I will guide you through the steps to merge a git repository into Turborepo.

I won't be explaining what a monorepo is in this article, but if you are interested in learning more about it, I have made a similar article on how to merge a git repository into Nx.

Step 1: Clone the source repository

The first step is to clone the repository you want to merge into the Turborepo monorepo. You can do this by running the following command:

git clone <repo-url> source-repo

Change the directory to the cloned repository:

cd source-repo

Step 2: Filter the source repository into its own subdirectory

For this step we will use the git filter-repo tool to filter the source repository into its own subdirectory, this will also filter the history of the repository.

git filter-repo --to-subdirectory-filter folder-name

Replace folder-name with the desired subdirectory for this repository in the monorepo.

Step 3: Push the Filtered Repo to the Monorepo

Add the monorepo as a remote:

git remote add monorepo <monorepo-url>

Push the filtered history to a unique branch (e.g., old-repo-1):

git push monorepo HEAD:refs/heads/old-repo-1

In the monorepo

Fetch and merge the source repository history into the monorepo:

git fetch origin old-repo-1

git merge --allow-unrelated-histories old-repo-1

This command will merge the source repository history into our Turborepo, now you just need to move your files to the correct location in the monorepo and you are good to go.