# How to mirror a directory of a repo? 2 messages from 2021-04-02 to 2021-04-02. Participants: Peng Yu, brian m. carlson. Thread: https://gitlist.dev/t/55423 ## Peng Yu, 2021-04-02 00:49 Subject: How to mirror a directory of a repo? Message-ID: URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/CABrM6wkbvC4AvFnbirtRDAr0VBPaueoSP2PEr0W89evG3sPqAQ%40mail.gmail.com In-Reply-To: ``` https://github.com/bayandin/chromedriver It seems that the above repo is a mirror of one particular subdirectory of the main chromium repository https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/ https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/chrome/test/chromedriver/ I don't know how a repo can be partially cloned. Could anybody let me know how this is done? Thanks. -- Regards, Peng ``` ## brian m. carlson, 2021-04-02 02:11 Subject: Re: How to mirror a directory of a repo? Message-ID: URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/YGZ9OOf%2Bcr5JvMwv%40camp.crustytoothpaste.net In-Reply-To: ``` On 2021-04-02 at 00:49:50, Peng Yu wrote: > https://github.com/bayandin/chromedriver > > It seems that the above repo is a mirror of one particular > subdirectory of the main chromium repository > https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/ > > https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/chrome/test/chromedriver/ > > I don't know how a repo can be partially cloned. Could anybody let me > know how this is done? Thanks. There isn't a way to clone just a single directory of a repository. The protocol doesn't consider that, and even if you could get such a clone to happen, it would be considered corrupt and a lot of things would be broken. Partial clone can be used to do something similar, but not completely the same. In such a case, you download stub objects that are filled in by a connection to the server on demand. What is most likely to have happened is that someone took a script that extracts the commits that touch a particular directory and created a new, entirely different repository and synthesized commits there with the same commit metadata. The two repositories are likely completely independent in terms of histories. Sorry there isn't a magic cool explanation for what's going on here, but it really is essentially a copy-and-paste into a different repo. -- brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them) Houston, Texas, US ```