What is the most efficient mechanism (in respect to data transferred and disk space used) to get the contents of a single file from a remote git repository?
So far I've managed to come up with:
git clone --no-checkout --depth 1 [email protected]:foo/bar.git && cd bar && git show HEAD:path/to/file.txt
This still seems overkill.
What about getting multiple files from the repo?
This question is related to
git
git-checkout
sparse-checkout
git-sparse-checkout
If there is web interface deployed (like gitweb, cgit, Gitorious, ginatra), you can use it to download single file ('raw' or 'plain' view).
If other side enabled it, you can use git archive's '--remote=<URL>
' option (and possibly limit it to a directory given file resides in), for example:
$ git archive [email protected]:foo/bar.git --prefix=path/to/ HEAD:path/to/ | tar xvf -
in git version 1.7.9.5 this seems to work to export a single file from a remote
git archive --remote=ssh://host/pathto/repo.git HEAD README.md
This will cat the contents of the file README.md
.
Related to @Steven Penny's answer, I also use wget. Furthermore, to decide which file to send the output to I use -O .
If you are using gitlabs another possibility for the url is:
wget "https://git.labs.your-server/your-repo/raw/master/<path-to-file>" -O <output-file>
Unless you have the certificate or you access from a trusted server for the gitlabs installation you need --no-check-certificate as @Kos said. I prefer that rather than modifying .wgetrc but it depends on your needs.
If it is a big file you might consider using -c option with wget. To be able to continue downloading the file from where you left it if the previous intent failed in the middle.
To export a single file from a remote:
git archive --remote=ssh://host/pathto/repo.git HEAD README.md | tar -x
This will download the file README.md
to your current directory.
If you want the contents of the file exported to STDOUT:
git archive --remote=ssh://host/pathto/repo.git HEAD README.md | tar -xO
You can provide multiple paths at the end of the command.
It looks like a solution to me: http://gitready.com/intermediate/2009/02/27/get-a-file-from-a-specific-revision.html
git show HEAD~4:index.html > local_file
where 4
means four revision from now and ~
is a tilde as mentioned in the comment.
If you repository supports tokens (for example GitLab) then generate a token for your user then navigate to the file you will download and click on RAW output to get the URL. To download the file use:
curl --silent --request GET --header 'PRIVATE-TOKEN: replace_with_your_token' \
'http://git.example.com/foo/bar.sql' --output /tmp/bar.sql
I solved in this way:
git archive --remote=ssh://[email protected]/user/mi-repo.git BranchName /path-to-file/file_name | tar -xO /path-to-file/file_name > /path-to-save-the-file/file_name
If you want, you could replace "BranchName" for "HEAD"
Not in general but if you are using Github:
For me wget
to the raw url turned out to be the best and easiest way to download one particular file.
Open the file in the browser and click on "Raw" button. Now refresh your browser, copy the url and do a wget
or curl
on it.
wget example:
wget 'https://github.abc.abc.com/raw/abc/folder1/master/folder2/myfile.py?token=DDDDnkl92Kw8829jhXXoxBaVJIYW-h7zks5Vy9I-wA%3D%3D' -O myfile.py
Curl example:
curl 'https://example.com/raw.txt' > savedFile.txt
Github Enterprise Solution
HTTPS_DOMAIN=https://git.your-company.com
ORGANISATION=org
REPO_NAME=my-amazing-library
FILE_PATH=path/to/some/file
BRANCH=develop
GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN=<your-access-token>
URL="${HTTPS_DOMAIN}/raw/${ORGANISATION}/${REPO_NAME}/${BRANCH}/${FILE_PATH}"
curl -H "Authorization: token ${GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN}" ${URL} > "${FILE_PATH}"
Yisrael Dov's answer is the straightforward one, but it doesn't allow compression. You can use --format=zip
, but you can't directly unzip that with a pipe command like you can with tar, so you need to save it as a temporary file. Here's a script:
#!/bin/bash
BASENAME=$0
function usage {
echo "usage: $BASENAME <remote-repo> <file> ..."
exit 1
}
[ 2 -gt "$#" ] && { usage; }
REPO=$1
shift
FILES=$@
TMPFILE=`mktemp`.zip
git archive -9 --remote=$REPO HEAD $FILES -o $TMPFILE
unzip $TMPFILE
rm $TMPFILE
This works with directories too.
A nuanced variant of some of the answers here that answers the OP's question:
git archive [email protected]:foo/bar.git \
HEAD path/to/file.txt | tar -xO path/to/file.txt > file.txt
If you don't mind cloning the entire directory, this small bash/zsh function will have the end result of cloning a single file into your current directory (by cloning the repo into a temp directory and removing it afterwards).
Pro: You only get the file you want
Con: You still have to wait for the whole repo to clone
git-single-file () {
if [ $# -lt 2 ]
then
echo "Usage: $0 <repo url> <file path>"
return
fi
TEMP_DIR=$(mktemp -d)
git clone $1 $TEMP_DIR
cp $TEMP_DIR/$2 .
rm -rf $TEMP_DIR
}
If you want to get a file from a specific hash + a remote repository I've tried git-archive and it didn't work.
You would have to use git clone and once the repository is cloned you would have then to use git-archive to make it work.
I post a question about how to do it more simpler in git archive from a specific hash from remote
If your Git repository hosted on Azure-DevOps (VSTS) you can retrieve a single file with Rest API.
The format of this API looks like this:
https://dev.azure.com/{organization}/_apis/git/repositories/{repositoryId}/items?path={pathToFile}&api-version=4.1?download=true
For example:
https://dev.azure.com/{organization}/_apis/git/repositories/278d5cd2-584d-4b63-824a-2ba458937249/items?scopePath=/MyWebSite/MyWebSite/Views/Home/_Home.cshtml&download=true&api-version=4.1
For single file, just use wget command.
First, follow the pic below to click "raw" to get the url, otherwise you will download code embedded in html.
Then, the browser will open a new page with url start with https://raw.githubusercontent.com/...
just enter the command in the terminal:
#wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/...
A while the file will put in your folder.
I use this
$ cat ~/.wgetrc
check_certificate = off
$ wget https://raw.github.com/jquery/jquery/master/grunt.js
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 11339 (11K) [text/plain]
Saving to: `grunt.js'
Following on from Jakub's answer. git archive
produces a tar or zip archive, so you need to pipe the output through tar to get the file content:
git archive --remote=git://git.foo.com/project.git HEAD:path/to/directory filename | tar -x
Will save a copy of 'filename' from the HEAD of the remote repository in the current directory.
The :path/to/directory
part is optional. If excluded, the fetched file will be saved to <current working dir>/path/to/directory/filename
In addition, if you want to enable use of git archive --remote
on Git repositories hosted by git-daemon, you need to enable the daemon.uploadarch config option. See https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-daemon.html
I use curl, it works with public repos or those using https basic authentication via a web interface.
curl -L --retry 20 --retry-delay 2 -O https://github.com/ACCOUNT/REPO/raw/master/PATH/TO/FILE/FILE.TXT -u USER:PASSWORD
I've tested it on github and bitbucket, works on both.
It seems to me the easiest way to use the following:
wget https://github.com/name/folder/file.zip?raw=true
If your goal is just to download the file there's a hassle-free application called gget
:
gget github.com/gohugoio/hugo 'hugo_extended_*_Linux-ARM.deb'
The above example would download single file from hugo
repository.
The following 2 commands worked for me:
git archive --remote={remote_repo_git_url} {branch} {file_to_download} -o {tar_out_file}
Downloads file_to_download
as tar
archive from branch
of remote repository whose url is remote_repo_git_url
and stores it in tar_out_file
tar -x -f {tar_out_file}.tar
extracts the file_to_download
from tar_out_file
Source: Stackoverflow.com