I want to clone a GIT repo and NOT end up with a .git directory. In other words I just want the files. Is there a way to do this?
git clone --no-checkout did the exact opposite of what I want (gave me just the .git directory).
I am trying to do that for a remote repo, not a local one, meaning this is not a duplicate of "How to do a “git export” (like “svn export”)" (even though the solution might end up being the same).
This question is related to
git
git --work-tree=/tmp/files_without_dot_git clone --depth=1 \
https://git.yourgit.your.com/myawesomerepo.git \
/tmp/deleteme_contents_of_dot_git
Both the directories in /tmp are created on the fly. No need to pre-create these.
git archive --format=tar --remote=<repository URL> HEAD | tar xf -
taken from here
Why not perform a clone and then delete the .git directory so that you just have a bare working copy?
Edit: Or in fact why use clone at all? It's a bit confusing when you say that you want a git repo but without a .git directory. If you mean that you just want a copy of some state of the tree then why not do cp -R in the shell instead of the git clone and then delete the .git afterwards.
No need to use git at all, just append "/zipball/master/" to URL (source).
This solution is the closest to "Download ZIP" button on github page. One advantage is lack of .git directory. The other one - it downloads single ZIP file instead of each file one by one, and this can make huge difference. It can be done from command line by wget: wget -O "$(basename $REPO_URL)".zip "$REPO_URL"/zipball/master/. The only problem is, that some repositories might not have master branch at all. If this is the case, "master" in URL should be replaced by appropriate branch.
Once the ZIP is there, the final unzipped directory name may still be pretty weird and unexpected. To fix this, name can be extracted by this script, and mv-ed to basename of the URL. Final script.sh could look something like (evals for dealing with spaces):
#Script for downloading from github. If no BRANCH_NAME is given, default is "master".
#usage: script.sh URL [BRANCH_NAME]
__repo_name__='basename "$1"'
__repo_name__="$(eval $__repo_name__)"
__branch__="${2:-master}"
#downloading
if [ ! -e ./"$__repo_name__"".zip" ] ; then
wget -O "$__repo_name__"".zip" "$1""/zipball/$__branch__/"
fi
#unpacking and renaming
if [ ! -e ./"$__repo_name__" ] ; then
unzip "$__repo_name__"".zip" &&
__dir_name__="$(unzip -qql $__repo_name__.zip | sed -r '1 {s/([ ]+[^ ]+){3}\s+//;q}')" &&
rm "$__repo_name__"".zip" &&
mv "$__dir_name__" "$__repo_name__"
fi
This approach shoud do the work for "just the files", and it is great for quick single-use access to small repositories.
However. If the source is rather big, and the only possibility to update is to download and rebuild all, then (to the best of my knowledge) there is no possibility to update .git-less directory, so the full repo has to be downloaded again. Then the best solution is - as VonC has already explained - to stick with shallow copy git clone --depth 1 $REPO_URL. But what next? To "check for updates" see link, and to update see great wiki-like answer.
It sounds like you just want a copy of the source code. If so why not just copy the directory and exclude the .git directory from the copy?
you can create a shallow clone to only get the last few revisions:
git clone --depth 1 git://url
then either simply delete the .git directory or use git archive to export your tree.
There's another way to do this by splitting the repo from the working tree.
This method is useful if you need to update these git-less git files on a regular basis. For instance, I use it when I need to check out source files and build an artifact, then copy the artifact into a different repo just for deployment to a server, and I also use it when pushing source code to a server when I want the source code to checkout and build into the www directory.
We'll make two folders, one for the git one for the working files:
mkdir workingfiles
mkdir barerepo.git
initialize a bare git repo:
cd barerepo.git
git --bare init
Then create a post-receive hook:
touch hooks/post-receive
chmod ug+x hooks/post-receive
Edit post-receive in your favorite editor:
GIT_WORK_TREE=/path/to/workingfiles git checkout -f
# optional stuff:
cd down/to/some/directory
[do some stuff]
Add this as a remote:
git remote add myserver ssh://user@host:/path/to/barerepo.git
Now every time you push to this bare repo it will checkout the working tree to /workingfiles/. But /workingfiles/ itself is not under version control; running git status in /workingfiles/ will give the error fatal: Not a git repository (or any parent up to mount point /data). It's just plain files.
Unlike other solutions rm -r .git command is not needed, so if /workingfiles/ is some other git repo you don't have to worry about the command used removing the other repo's git files.
Source: Stackoverflow.com