Duplicating a git repository to create a template repository

I find out how to duplicate a repository (repo) in GitHub to create a template for other projects. Turns out it’s straightforward.

The scenario

My Panda-Puss WordPress (WP) block theme has come along in leaps and bounds recently, after fighting WP about almost everything. I have focused on the layout, keeping most styling matters (e.g. colours and fonts) for later. I’m saving all the changes in a GitHub repo called panda-puss.

It dawned on me that I might like to use the Panda-Puss WP theme as a base for other themes, so I wanted to create a copy of my panda-puss repo that I could use like a template, but without affecting the panda-puss repo itself. But how to do it?

The palaver

I turned to the internet (of course) to see if anything like what I wanted was possible.

Creating template repositories

I discovered that GitHub introduced template repos in June 2019, so part of what I wanted was possible. There’s a simple switch in the repo’s general settings that allows you to toggle that repo into a template and back again:

I was delighted to find that it would be easy to set a repo as a template for new WP themes. However, I didn’t want the WP theme template repo to be called panda-puss; I wanted to rename panda-puss to something generic like panda-wp_theme_template, convert panda-wp_theme_template to a template, then creating a new repo based on panda-wp_theme_template called panda-puss. I’d need some way of creating a new repo based on panda-puss.

Creating a second repository

I considered three possibilities, two of which involved forking panda-puss and one of which involved a simple rename of panda-puss:

Forking repositories

My first idea involving forks was to create a fork and convert that fork into a template; I’d continue development of panda-puss as if nothing had happened.

My second idea involving forks was create a fork and use that as panda-puss; the original repo would become the template repo. This one potentially involves renaming the repos.

I looked at GitHub’s documentation on forking repos; it says that forks are used to either propose changes to someone else’s project to which you don’t have write access, or to use someone else’s project as a starting point for your own idea. I’d be forking my own repo; what difference would it make?

It turns out it makes a lot of difference: GitHub’s interface allows you only to fork other people’s repositories, as indicated by the tooltip that appears over the greyed-out fork button in your own repository:

That meant both of these options were impossible. Time to look at the third option: simply renaming the repository and using it as a template from which to derive a new panda-puss repo.

Renaming repositories

When I looked into renaming repos, I found that the GitHub documentation on renaming a repo specifically warns against doing what I wanted to do:

Warning: If you create a new repository under your account in the future, do not reuse the original name of the renamed repository. If you do, redirects to the renamed repository will break.

Renaming a repository, GitHub Docs

So much for a simple rename.

I came up with another idea: would it be possible to make a copy of a repo and use the copy as the template?

Duplicating repositories

After some more rummaging around the internet, I discovered that you can indeed duplicate a repository, and that it’s not even difficult to do, although it seems a bit scary. I created a repo on which to test this before I did it for real to make absolutely sure it would do what I thought it would do.

All you have to do is:

1. Make a local bare clone from the remote repo.
2. Create a new repo on the server.
3. Mirror-push the local bare clone to the new repo on the server.
4. Delete the local bare clone.

Then all that has to be done is to set the new repo to be a template, and that’s it: done.

The solution

To create a copy of my panda-puss repo and convert it to a template repo, I performed the following steps, where username is my username, original-repository is my panda-puss repo and new-repository is panda-wp_theme_template:

1. In the command-line interface, make a local bare clone from the remote repo (it doesn’t matter where you do this because git creates a new directory, which you’re going to delete when you’re done):

   git clone --bare https://github.com/username/original-repository.git

2. Create a new repo on the server as described by the GitHub document Creating a new repository.
3. Mirror-push the local bare clone to the new repo on the server:

   cd original-repository.gitgit push --mirror https://github.com/exampleuser/new-repository.git

4. Delete the local bare clone:

   cd ..rm -rf original-repository.git

5. Select the template repo option in GitHub’s settings (assuming you’re looking at your repo on the GitHub website):

   Settings > General > Template repository

   

All done!