Mirror git repo into new branch

Question

I want to mirror one of my repos into a privat one to make some non public changes but still getting updates from the public one. The problem with normal mirror is that all the time i update the privat repo my changes get deletet. Is there a way to fix this?

My idea was to make it like this:

Repo A is public and Repo B is privat. My privat repo has the branches main, repoA, my fixes. Now i want to mirror repo A into repo B branch repoA.

But this also destroyed branch my fixes all the time i tried updating.

Answer 1

You don't want to use --mirror . Using that option is why you are having trouble. The --mirror option forces exactly the behavior you are seeing and don't want. It causes your changes to be blasted when you update from the original repo. You only use --mirror when you want the copy to never differ at all from the original (once updated).

In your case, you want to use --bare instead, as it will provide the part of the behavior of --mirror that you do want, that of creating just a copy of the underlying repository without a working directory. But unlike --mirror , --bare does not cause future changes to the copy to be lost when the copy is updated from the original. If you understand what a straight "clone" does with no behavior changing flags, then you know what --bare does. The --bare flag only affects the form that the repo takes on disk. It doesn't change anything about how updates are applied between repos.