Browse and display files in a git repo without cloning

Question

Is there a way to browse and display files in a git repo without cloning it first  I can do those in svn using the commands    svn ls  path to repo  svn cat  path to repo file-in-repo   I can supposedly use git show but doing    git show  path to repo git show HEAD  path to repo   result to    fatal  Not a git repository

User · Answer

Not the exact  but a way around   Use GitHub Developer API   Opening this will get you the recent commits   https   api github com repos learningequality ka-lite commits  You can get the specific commit details by attaching the commit hash in the end of above url  All the files   You need sha for the main tree   https   api github com repos learningequality ka-lite git trees 7b698a988683b161bdcd48a949b01e2b336b4c01   I hope this may help

User · Answer

Git is distributed version control system  while Subversion is centralized  client-server  version control system   They work differently  get used to that   Please read my answer explaining the consequences of that difference to git equivalent of svn status -u question at StackOverflow   Repeating myself a bit  in centralized version control system  like CVS or Subversion  almost all commands are processed on server  and involve network   Very few commands are performed locally   Note that to have good performance of  svn status  and  svn diff  Subversion stores  pristine copy  of checked-out version on client  to not have to involve network transfer for those common operations  this means that Subversion checkout   2 x size of working directory at least    In distributed version control system  like Git  Mercurial or Bazaar   where you have local copy  clone  of a whole repository  almost all commands are performed on client   Very few commands require network connection to other repository  to server      The number of command you can perform on server is limited      You can list all references on remote with  git ls-remote  lt URL gt      You can get snapshot of  part  of repository  if remote server enabled it  with  git archive --remote  lt URL gt  HEAD     You can clone only a few last commits  so called  shallow clone   with  git clone --depth 1  lt URL gt      If server provides git web interface to repository  you can use it to browse

User · Answer

if you know the remote branch you want to check  you can find out the latest via   git ls-tree -r  lt remote branch gt  --name-only

User · Answer

Take a look at http   git-scm com book en Git-Internals-Transfer-Protocols for info on how to do this over some transport protocols  Note this won t work for standard git over SSH   For git over SSH  an up-to-date server-side git should allow you to git-archive directly from the remote  which you could then e g  pipe to  tar t  to get a list of all files in a given commit

User · Answer

This is probably considered dirty by some  but a very practical solution in case of github repositories is just to make a script  e g   git-ls       bin sh remote url   1     0 requires URL as argument   curl -s  remote url   grep js-directory-link   sed  s    title               1     Make it executable and reachable of course  chmod a x git-ls  sudo cp git-ls  usr local bin  Now  you just run it as you wish   git-ls https   github com mrquincle aim-bzr git-ls https   github com mrquincle aim-bzr tree master aim modules   Also know that there is a git instaweb utility for your local files  To have the ability to show files and have a server like that does in my opinion not destroy any of the inherent decentralized characteristics of git

User · Answer

While you have to checkout a repository  you can skip checking out any files with --no-checkout and --depth 1    time git clone --no-checkout --depth 1 https   github com torvalds linux   Cloning into        remote  Enumerating objects  75646  done  remote  Counting objects  100   75646 75646   done  remote  Compressing objects  100   71197 71197   done  remote  Total 75646  delta 6176   reused 22237  delta 3672   pack-reused 0 Receiving objects  100   75646 75646   201 46 MiB   7 27 MiB s  done  Resolving deltas  100   6176 6176   done   real    0m46 117s user    0m13 412s sys     0m19 641s  And while there is only a  git directory    ls -al total 0 drwxr-xr-x   3 root  staff    96 Dec 26 23 57   drwxr-xr-x  71 root  staff  2272 Dec 27 00 03    drwxr-xr-x  12 root  staff   384 Dec 26 23 58  git  you can get a directory listing via    git ls-tree --full-name --name-only -r HEAD   head  clang-format  cocciconfig  get maintainer ignore  gitattributes  gitignore  mailmap COPYING CREDITS Documentation  gitignore Documentation ABI README  or get the number of files via    git ls-tree -r HEAD   wc -l    71259  or get the total file size via    git ls-tree -l -r HEAD   awk      -    s   4  END  print s   1006679487

User · Answer

GitHub is svn compatible so you can use svn ls  svn ls https   github com user repository git branches master    BitBucket supports git archive so you can download tar archive and list archived files  It is not very efficient but works   git archive --remote git bitbucket org repository HEAD directory   tar -t

User · Answer

The command you want is git ls-remote which allows you to get some information about remote repositories  but you cant show history or list directories or anything of that level  essentially it only lets you see the remote objects at a very high-level  you can see the current HEADs and tags for example    The only real way to do what you want  if I understand correctly  would be to use ssh to run a remote command and return the results  for example   ssh me otherhost  cd repo  amp  amp  git log -n 10    What you want would be lovely functionality if they could add it  but from what I read it s not very easy since getting history etc needs a lot of information to be local to git  and at that point you may as well have done a git fetch

[git] Browse and display files in a git repo without cloning

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