How to sparsely checkout only one single file from a git repository?
Originally, I mentioned in 2012 git archive
(see Jared Forsyth's answer and Robert Knight's answer), since git1.7.9.5 (March 2012), Paul Brannan's answer:
git archive --format=tar --remote=origin HEAD:path/to/directory -- filename | tar -O -xf -
But: in 2013, that was no longer possible for remote https://github.com URLs.
See the old page "Can I archive a repository?"
The current (2018) page "About archiving content and data on GitHub" recommends using third-party services like GHTorrent or GH Archive.
So you can also deal with local copies/clone:
You could alternatively do the following if you have a local copy of the bare repository as mentioned in this answer,
git --no-pager --git-dir /path/to/bar/repo.git show branch:path/to/file >file
Or you must clone first the repo, meaning you get the full history: - in the .git repo - in the working tree.
- But then you can do a sparse checkout (if you are using Git1.7+),:
- enable the sparse checkout option (
git config core.sparsecheckout true
) - adding what you want to see in the
.git/info/sparse-checkout
file - re-reading the working tree to only display what you need
- enable the sparse checkout option (
To re-read the working tree:
$ git read-tree -m -u HEAD
That way, you end up with a working tree including precisely what you want (even if it is only one file)
Richard Gomes points (in the comments) to "How do I clone, fetch or sparse checkout a single directory or a list of directories from git repository?"
A bash function which avoids downloading the history, which retrieves a single branch and which retrieves a list of files or directories you need.
First clone the repo with the -n option, which suppresses the default checkout of all files, and the --depth 1 option, which means it only gets the most recent revision of each file
git clone -n git://path/to/the_repo.git --depth 1
Then check out just the file you want like so:
cd the_repogit checkout HEAD name_of_file
If you already have a copy of the git repo, you can always checkout a version of a file using a git log
to find out the hash-id (for example 3cdc61015724f9965575ba954c8cd4232c8b42e4) and then you simply type:
git checkout hash-id path-to-file
Here is an actual example:
git checkout 3cdc61015724f9965575ba954c8cd4232c8b42e4 /var/www/css/page.css