# git cloning paths 3 messages from 2012-07-12 to 2012-07-25. Participants: Douglas Garstang, Jeff King, Caleb Marchent. Thread: https://gitlist.dev/t/31012 ## Douglas Garstang, 2012-07-12 22:17 Subject: git cloning paths Message-ID: URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/CANmEAK_jGdzR9R%3D0DexC%2B-_0U6mb_7o_v5zSKTuhgoaYCaSiFQ%40mail.gmail.com ``` All, I'm a relative newcomer to git and I've just inherited a setup where all of the company's code is in a single git repository. Within this repository are multiple projects. It seems that git doesn't natively allow cloning/checking out of individual paths within the repo (ie projects), which would seem to make integrating git with a continuous build system rather difficult. That is, the build system has to clone the entire repo, and therefore a change to any project will result in the entire contents of the repo being built. Correct....? Doug. ``` ## Jeff King, 2012-07-13 08:07 Subject: Re: git cloning paths Message-ID: <20120713080731.GA32303@sigill.intra.peff.net> URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/20120713080731.GA32303%40sigill.intra.peff.net In-Reply-To: ``` On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 03:17:09PM -0700, Douglas Garstang wrote: > I'm a relative newcomer to git and I've just inherited a setup where > all of the company's code is in a single git repository. Within this > repository are multiple projects. It seems that git doesn't natively > allow cloning/checking out of individual paths within the repo (ie > projects), which would seem to make integrating git with a continuous > build system rather difficult. That is, the build system has to clone > the entire repo, and therefore a change to any project will result in > the entire contents of the repo being built. > > Correct....? Yes. The feature you are looking for is either "sparse checkout" (only check out a subset of the files in the repository databse to the working tree) or "sparse clone" (only copy a subset of the files into the local repository database during clone). Git v1.7.0 and later has sparse checkout (see the "sparse checkout" section in "git help read-tree"). There is no implementation for sparse clone (and not likely to be one any time soon, as it introduces a lot of complexity into the object negotiation phase). The usual advice is that you should break up your big repository into logical projects. You can do so with git-filter-branch, but beware that this involves rewriting history, which means a flag day for everybody switching to the new history (or dealing with migrating commits from the old history to the new history via rebase). Finally, if you have a build system which is cloning repeatedly, you may want to keep a repository on the build server all the time and just fetch the updates into it. This is much more efficient even if you do end up paring down your repository. -Peff ``` ## Caleb Marchent, 2012-07-25 15:22 Subject: RE: git cloning paths Message-ID: <9C3609BEC91A814BB52DBF9C41F04D1E74D159A0@uk-swa-ex02> URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/9C3609BEC91A814BB52DBF9C41F04D1E74D159A0%40uk-swa-ex02 In-Reply-To: ``` Hi Doug, The method I have been using to achieve this is to create a wrapper script that does the following: git clone -n # clone, but don't checkout cd git config core.sparseCheckout true # configure sparse-checkout on # echo the list of bits you want into .git/info/sparse-checkout git checkout Do watch out though, the interpretation of the sparse-checkout file has changed since git 1.7, I would suggest you use the latest git and record the git version as a comment in top of the sparse checkout file, in case it changes again. I hope this helps, Caleb -----Original Message----- From: git-owner@vger.kernel.org [mailto:git-owner@vger.kernel.org] On Behalf Of Douglas Garstang Sent: 12 July 2012 23:17 To: git@vger.kernel.org Subject: git cloning paths All, I'm a relative newcomer to git and I've just inherited a setup where all of the company's code is in a single git repository. Within this repository are multiple projects. It seems that git doesn't natively allow cloning/checking out of individual paths within the repo (ie projects), which would seem to make integrating git with a continuous build system rather difficult. That is, the build system has to clone the entire repo, and therefore a change to any project will result in the entire contents of the repo being built. Correct....? Doug. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html ```