Support `git --follow` to preserve history across renames

[cletusw]

When a file is moved or renamed, the GitHub History doesn't show commits from before the move. Git itself supports the --follow option to show full history in these cases (and apparently it's much less buggy now then it used to be), but there is no way to achieve this in GitHub.

This has been requested many times, but has yet to be implemented.

Current workaround seems to be installing this Chrome extension, but that's insufficient for a large dev team.

[cletusw]

My response from GitHub:

Thanks for reaching out about this! I'll add your +1 to the feature request for enabling the --follow flag to handle file renames better.

I can't promise if or when this change will happen, but your feedback is in the right hands!

GitHub Support

[emesterhazy]

This chrome extension is a nice workaround, but this feature should be supported natively. For example, the --follow option is standard on Gitlab.

[mahboud]

Any news? It's tedious not to be able to see that a couple files are merely the same, but after a name change rather than to see two very large diffs.

[qwertzguy]

Any updates? We have Github Enterprise and this is an ongoing pain for the entire company.

[chrisgorski-fugue]

Please enable this feature.

[Adam-Langley]

wow - just got bitten by this myself... I took the time to build a migration script to move my SVN repos across to GitHub while maintaining full history, but did a little structure tidying up in the process - and was then surprised to see my carefully reconstructed history was "missing" :(

[HazAT]

We (@getsentry) recently made the transition to a mono repo, merging all our JS SDKs together.
We think a mono repo is easier for users to find and submitting new issues/prs to.
On top for us it's easier to handle because we only have to maintain one repo.

Long story short, we just realized we ran into this as well.
We moved this file for example in a subfolder:
https://github.com/getsentry/raven-js/commits/master/packages/raven-js/src/raven.js

Before it was here:
https://github.com/getsentry/raven-js/commits/90ba2470379bb4c5a85c30d86387e0200aa7ffcf/src/raven.js

while a local git log --follow packages/raven-js/src/raven.js works like a charm, it's sad to see that Github is not showing the whole log for the file 😢

We'd love to browse through the source on Github, also the blame view is very helpful at times. The chrome extension is better than nothing but we hope this will be the default on Github.

Would sponsor a 🍺 for this feature 🤜 🤛

Cheers

[girishkg]

I also recently moved tons of source code from SVN to GitHub (internal enterprise instance) but this feature is really a missing peace with the enterprise offerings. We need this ASAP as this is very useful and mandatory feature.

[brunorijsman]

+1 Ability to preserve pre-move history of file after moving it to a different directory is must-have functionality. Was more than a little amazed to find out this is not available on Github. Was even more amazed to discover that Github does not provide any official way for the community to request / vote on feature requests. Quite counter intuitive given what Github is.

[MrChocolateMoose]

What is the process to prioritize and implement this feature? We, additionally, would love to see this feature implemented!

[c4urself]

Would love this, going to follow this thread with great anticipation.

[harleensahni]

Can github as a stopgap at least alert you when viewing the history for the file that the history is not complete (and suggest you view the history from git with --follow)? This would be a good first step.

[laike9m]

Wait, this is the largest Git repo hosting website and It's not supported? 😱