Archive Git repositories with Shell Script

Shell script to clone repositories at a specific branch, remove the .git folder, and have a clean, archived copy of the repository.

Git Repositories and Branch Names

Recently, I needed to archive multiple Git repositories into a single Git repository. In addition, some of these archived repositories have multiple branches worth archiving. So, I needed to support a format like this:

"git@github.com:KenanBek/dbui.git;main,dev"
"git@github.com:KenanBek/django-skeleton.git;master"

Each line contains,

• Git URL;
• Comma (,) separate list of branch names;

Git URL and branch names are separated by a semicolon (;).

Shell Script to Archive

The goal is to have a simple shell script that will automate the following steps:

1. Parse a list in the above-provided format and get repository URL and branch names;
2. Iterate over each repository and branch, check commit-hash;
3. If there are changes, clone the repository at each branch (e.g., repo1-main, repo1-dev, repo2-main, etc.);
4. Remove .git folder from each cloned repository subdirectory;
5. Commit and push;

Based on the above, we will have one git repository with archived content of listed repositories. The structure of the archive repository is as follows:

git-archive.sh # our shell script
repo1-main
repo1-dev
repo2-main
...

The Script

# parse the command-line arguments
while getopts ":nh" opt; do
  case ${opt} in
    h)
      echo "Usage:"
      echo "  git-clone.sh [-n]"
      echo ""
      echo "Options:"
      echo "  -n  Skip commit and push"
      exit 0
      ;;
    n)
      # set a flag to skip the commit_and_push function
      no_push=1
      ;;
    \?)
      echo "Invalid option: -$OPTARG" >&2
      exit 1
      ;;
  esac
done

# list of repositories with list of branches for each repository
repos=(
    "git@github.com:KenanBek/dbui.git;main,dev"…