I have a local Git repository called 'skeleton' that I use for storing project skeletons. It has a few branches, for different kinds of projects:
casey@agave [~/Projects/skeleton] git branch
* master
rails
c
c++
If I want to check out the master branch for a new project, I can do
casey@agave [~/Projects] git clone skeleton new
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/casey/Projects/new/.git/
and everything is how I want it. Specifically, the new master branch points to the skeleton master branch, and I can push and pull to move around changes to the basic project setup.
What doesn't work, however, is if I want to clone another branch. I can't get it so that I only pull the branch I want, for instance the rails branch, and then the new repository has a master branch that pushes to and pulls from the skeleton repository's rails branch, by default.
Is there a good way to go about doing this? Or, maybe this isn't the way that Git wants me to structure things, and I'm certainly open to that. Perhaps I should have multiple repositories, with the Ruby on Rails skeleton repository tracking the master skeleton repository? And any individual project cloning the Ruby on Rails skeleton repository.
For cloning a branch of Git you don't have the public key to, use this:
git clone -b <branch> <Git repository URL or clone URL you get from Git repository>
Let us take the example of flask repo. It has 3 branches in addition to master. Let us checkout the 1.1.x remote branch
clone the git repo
git clone https://github.com/pallets/flask
cd into the repo.
cd flask
fetch remote branch 1.1.x
git fetch origin 1.1.x
checkout the branch
git checkout 1.1.x
You will switch to the branch 1.1.x and it will track the remote 1.1.x branch.
git clone <url> --branch <branch> --single-branch
Just put in URL and branch name.
you can use this command to git single branch and rename the folder if you want to keep branched stand alone
git clone -b [branch-name] --single-branch [url] [folder_name]
example
git clone -b mybranch --single-branch git://github/repository.git project_mybranch
For the newbies like me, just run the code below
git clone https://gitlab.com/repo/repo.git --branch <name of branch> --single-branch
Open the cmd.
cd folder_name # enter the path where to clone the branch
Just one command:
git clone url_of_projecturltoclone -b branch_name
This should work
git clone --single-branch <branchname> <remote-repo-url>
git clone --branch <branchname> <remote-repo-url>
Can be done in 2 steps
Clone the repository
git clone <http url>
Checkout the branch you want
git checkout $BranchName
There are primarily 2 solutions for this:
You need to specify the branch name with -b command switch. Here is the syntax of the command to clone the specific git branch.
git clone -b <BRANCH_NAME> <GIT_REMOTE_URL>
Example:
git clone -b tahir https://github.com/Repository/Project.git
The following command will clone the branch tahir from the git repository.The above command clones only the specific branch but fetches the details of other branches. You can view all branches details with command.
git branch -a
You can use --single-branch flag to prevent fetching details of other branches like below:
git clone -b <BRANCH_NAME> --single-branch <GIT_REMOTE_URL>
Example:
git clone -b tahir --single-branch \
https://github.com/Repository/Project.git
Now if you do a git branch -a, it will only show your current single branch that you have cloned and not all the branches. So it depends on you how you want it.
For cloning a specific branch you can do :
git clone --branch yourBranchName [email protected]
git clone --branch {branch-name} {repo-URI}
Example:
git clone --branch dev https://github.com/ann/cleaningmachine.git
{branch-name}{repo-URI}Using Git version 1.7.3.1 (on Windows), here's what I do ($BRANCH is the name of the branch I want to checkout and $REMOTE_REPO is the URL of the remote repository I want to clone from):
mkdir $BRANCH
cd $BRANCH
git init
git remote add -t $BRANCH -f origin $REMOTE_REPO
git checkout $BRANCH
The advantage of this approach is that subsequent git pull (or git fetch) calls will also just download the requested branch.
Clone only one branch. This is the easiest way:
git clone -b BRANCH_NAME --single-branch [email protected]:___/PROJECTNAME.git
You can try the long-winded way:
mkdir newrepo.git
cd newrepo.git
git init
git remote add origin file:///path/to/original
git fetch origin branchiwant:refs/remotes/origin/branchiwant
git checkout -b branchiwant --track origin/branchiwant
What this does is:
Hopefully that will be something like what you are after.
If you want a shallow clone, you can do this with:
git clone -b mybranch --depth=1 https://example.com/myproject.git localname
--depth=1 implies --single-branch.
You can do it by using the below command:
git clone -b branch_name --single-branch project_url local_folder_to_clone_in
A little late but I wanted to add the solution I used to solve this problem. I found the solution here.
Anyway, the question seems to be asking 'how to start a new project from a branch of another repo?'
To this, the solution I used would be to first create a new repo in github or where ever. This will serve as the repo to your new project.
On your local machine, navigate to the project that has the branch you want to use as the template for your new project.
Run the command:
git push https://github.com/accountname/new-repo.git +old_branch:master
What this will do is push the old_branch to new-repo and make it the master branch of the new repo.
You then just have to clone the new repo down to your new project's local directory and you have a new project started at the old branch.
From git-clone man page:
--single-branch is your friend during clone
remember to use with --branch <branch name> or only remote primary HEAD will be cloned (master by default)
Always remember to do Ctrl + F5 to read fresh source, not the one from cache :-) (I didn't so didn't know about this option for long time.)
One way is to execute the following.
git clone user@git-server:project_name.git -b branch_name /your/folder
Where branch_name is the branch of your choice and "/your/folder" is the destination folder for that branch. It's true that this will bring other branches giving you the opportunity to merge back and forth.
Update
Now, starting with Git 1.7.10, you can now do this
git clone user@git-server:project_name.git -b branch_name --single-branch /your/folder
Similar to what @nosaiba-darwish said here: here
This is what we usually do in our company:
git clone -b <name_of_branch> --single-branch <git_url> folder_to_clone_locally
There are ample answers here which mention:
# (We'll refer to this as "the 1st command" below.)
git clone -b branch_name --single-branch \
https://github.com/some_project/some_project.git
...or some version of that, and a few which mention just:
# (We'll refer to this as "the 2nd command" below.)
git clone -b branch_name https://github.com/some_project/some_project.git
...withOUT the --single-branch part.
But, I'd like to expound upon these two things a bit and show a more familiar set of equivalent commands so we can see what is happening with each under-the-hood.
Let's assume that you have a remote repo on GitHub at https://github.com/micronucleus/micronucleus.git, with remote branches master and version_2.5 (this is a real example you can actually run right now).
The 2nd command (git clone -b version_2.5 https://github.com/micronucleus/micronucleus.git) clones ALL REMOTE BRANCHES to your local PC, but then checks out the version_2.5 branch instead of the master branch. That one command is the equivalent of doing this:
git clone https://github.com/micronucleus/micronucleus.git
cd micronucleus # cd into the repo you just cloned
git checkout version_2.5
# To be pedantic, also delete the local `master` branch since
# technically it won't exist yet since you haven't yet checked
# it out with `git checkout master`, which would create it from
# your locally-stored remote-tracking branch, `origin/master`
git branch -d master
The -b version_2.5 part automatically checked out the version_2.5 branch for us instead of master.
git branch -a shows us that ALL branches, however, were cloned to our local PC. Here you can see our local branch version_2.5, which we are on, plus the locally-stored remote-tracking branches origin/HEAD (which points to origin/master), plus origin/master, and origin/version_2.5:
$ git branch -a
* version_2.5
remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
remotes/origin/master
remotes/origin/version_2.5
We can also look at what our fetch references are. You can either open up the .git/config file to see them directly, or just run git config remote.origin.fetch:
$ git config remote.origin.fetch
+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
You can see above that our git fetch command (which is also triggered by git pull since that is equivalent to git fetch && git merge) is configured to fetch ALL heads for ALL branches in the origin remote. I'm not an expert on this part, but I believe that's what +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* means.
The 1st command (git clone -b version_2.5 --single-branch https://github.com/micronucleus/micronucleus.git) clones ONLY the version_2.5 branch to your local PC, and it also checks it out. That one command is the equivalent of doing this (in the end result at least, except that it also downloads much less data in the beginning since it only clones ONE branch NOT all of them):
git clone https://github.com/micronucleus/micronucleus.git
cd micronucleus # cd into the repo you just cloned
git checkout version_2.5
# Delete ALL other branches, including remote-tracking ones, which are not the
# `version_2.5` branch:
# One local branch
git branch -d master
# ALL other locally-stored remote-tracking branches
git branch -dr origin/HEAD
git branch -dr origin/master
# Fix your `.git/config` file so that `git fetch` does the right thing, fetching
# ONLY the `version_2.5` branch head from the `origin/version_2.5` remote branch:
git config remote.origin.fetch \
"+refs/heads/version_2.5:refs/remotes/origin/version_2.5"
The -b version_2.5 part caused the version_2.5 branch to be checked out instead of the master branch by default (as previously explained above), and the --single-branch part caused:
git fetch to be configured such that NONE of the other branches will ever be fetched when we call git fetch or git pull!This command truly cloned and will fetch only the one branch we wanted, and that's it!
git branch -a shows us that ONLY the version_2.5 branch was cloned and checked out. Here we see by the * which branch is checked-out, and we see also that we have a locally-stored remote-tracking branch for origin/version_2.5:
$ git branch -a
* version_2.5
remotes/origin/version_2.5
We can also look at what our fetch references are. You can either open up the .git/config file to see them directly, or just run git config remote.origin.fetch:
$ git config remote.origin.fetch
+refs/heads/version_2.5:refs/remotes/origin/version_2.5
You can see above that our git fetch command will only fetch the version_2.5 branch head from the origin/version_2.5 remote branch. That's it! Beware that no other remote branches will ever be fetched.
So, now you see that using -b branch_name basically just ensures the branch_name branch is checked-out after the clone, but still clones ALL remote branches, whereas adding also --single-branch ensures that ONLY branch_name is cloned, fetched, pulled, and tracked. No other remote branches will be cloned to your PC whatsoever.
Personally, I prefer the -b branch_name option alone, because I want all branches cloned to my local PC. The one exception might be on a huge, shared mono-repo which has dozens, or even hundreds or thousands of remote branches. In that case, just use -b branch_name --single-branch to clone just the one main branch you care about and be done. Better to download 50 GiB of data for the master branch in a huge mono-repo, for instance, than to download 200 GiB of data so you can have 2000 of your peers' branches they are working on too!
Source: Stackoverflow.com