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There is no exact svn export equivalent command for git? Really?

Beware: this is not a duplicate question. That is, I already know and have tested these commands:

  • git clone --depth 1 <- Still downloads the .git folder.
  • git checkout-init <- Doesn't work for a remote repo, it works with a working copy (so you need to clone first).
  • git archive <- This would be the perfect solution, because it has a --remote argument, but it only has 2 possible formats: tar or zip, so I would need to untar/unzip after downloading, and for that I need a pipe (|), but I'm on windows!! (not *n?x)
  • git clone --bare <- I still don't know what the heck this is, but it's not what I need.

Please enlighten me is there a real svn export replacement in git?

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    This is not a duplicate of the proposed question. Basically the OP is asking how to download only the latest manifest of files from a remote repository. git archive works from a local clone so that is back to square 1: how to download only the latest manifest. Commented Jun 30, 2011 at 18:07
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    git clone --depth 1 is what you need, read the documentation that Bruno is linking to and his comment. Commented Jun 30, 2011 at 18:07
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    You will not get around "getting a .git folder", but you will get around downloading the entire changeset history with --depth 1. You still have to delete the .git folder afterwards. There is no getting around that. Commented Jun 30, 2011 at 18:10
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    If you've installed git on windows then presumably you have git bash and the associate tools that it installs such as tar. If this is the case you can use git archive and a pipe to tar. Commented Jul 2, 2011 at 6:02

8 Answers 8

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From How do I do a quick clone without history revisions?:

git clone --depth 1 your_repo_url

Then, from the rmdir documentation:

rd /s /q .git
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8 Comments

Stop proposing --depth, it's already mentioned in the question!
Not sure you understand what --depth does: it does not download all the revisions: it rebuilds a "fake" history only pretending to add the new files each time. You're not downloading any more than you would with the archive.
Its not polite to downvote answers to your own question, imo.
stackoverflow is not about politeness, it's about correctness
@knocte, quite surprised to see you're still active on this question. Nevertheless my answer was correct.
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The question "how can I do a svn-style 'export' with git?" is like asking "How can I change the tires on my basketball?". You can't, but that's not the basketball's fault. Yes it is rubber and full of air, but the similarity ends there.

You only need "export" with svn because it pollutes every single subdirectory with a .svn directory. Git doesn't do that, so you really don't need it. A clone IS an export, just with one directory at the root dir that all the repository business lives in.

The easiest thing is to clone the repo and then just delete the .git directory from the top level of the repo. Do that, and it's not a repo anymore, it's just a stand-alone directory of files.

Or, you know, ignore git all together and just use the files you cloned down. That works too.

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10 Comments

Irrelevant: removing the .git folder doesn't save the precious time and bandwidth that I could save by not downloading it in the first place.
Unless your repo contains a LOT of binaries in its history, the repo itself is only fractionally bigger than the checked out working directory will be. Also I can pretty much guarantee you've used up more time and bandwidth complaining about this than you would just using the tool the way it's built.
DanRay stop assuming the purpose of the tool. If I'm going to use it to download thousands of git repositories, the bandwidth savings would make sense, right?
I get the feeling that no answer other than "here is how you can make git perform just like your preferred tool" is going to satisfy... git and svn are VERY DIFFERENT from design to implementation.
That's one of the stupidest analogies I've read. For this specific task (downloading just files, not the history, for a specific revision) it makes all kinds of intuitive sense to expect a revision control system with atomic commits to have a command to accomplish it. The reason to use svn export is specifically to get a copy of a revision without history. So telling someone to clone, getting a copy with history, and then just ignore that history, is condescending at best. Also, SVN no longer pollutes every single directory with a .svn folder, as of version 1.7 released back in 2011.
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Just get rid of the repository within the working copy.

git clone remote
rm -Rf .git

(On Windows, it's rd /s /q. Thanks for the hint by @Bruno.)

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16 Comments

Perhaps rd /s /q instead of rm -Rf on Windows.
I had to look very closely at the question to find the "I'm on windows!!" ;) I don't know windows' commandline. I'll assume /s is he -Rf equivalent.
KingCrunch: irrelevant. The purpose of this is precisely to avoid deleting the ".git" folder later, and to save bandwidth and time by not downloading it.
This has nothing to do with "fanboys". You want svn export? Than must use svn, because DVCS works very different to centralized VCS. You cannot switch from SVN to git and work with it like it were SVN. Understand git and you will understand what happens here. Or leave it, but don't blame the messenger ;)
@knocte, of course, that could be added directly, not necessarily a bad idea. However, git fundamentally follows the unix approach of having a small command for each little things you need to do, which you can then combine. Some like this approach, some don't. I don't think git clone --depth followed by an rmdir is the hardest combination of commands you can get. Even with a potentially limited command line environment (e.g. Windows's cmd), it's not that hard. Doing it in one command might be better, but I'm not sure it's worth arguing like this...
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At some hostings like GitHub you can make exact svn export.

Example:

svn export https://github.com/GNOME/banshee/branches/master

Even partial! (some subpart of the repository)

Example:

svn export https://github.com/liferay/liferay-portal/branches/6.1.x/tools

For your own repository you should create some GitHub repository and add it as a remote:

git remote add github https://github.com/<user>/<repo>.git

then

git push github <branch>

Now you able to do a partial checkout as above.

UPDATE: Looks like this feature is getting discontinued.

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4 Comments

@knocte, the problem is that this answer doesn't answer the question. The fact that svn export works on GitHub has nothing to do with doing what you want with Git, it has to do with the fact the GitHub also offers a Subversion service that is a bridge to its Git repositories. It's still a Subversion server, though, not a Git one.
I know, but it's the least worse answer at the moment; I'm planning to contribute an option for this anyway, in git upstream, after 2.0 gets released (already contributed my first patch, I'm making progress)
The fact remains that git clone --depth 1 your_repo_url followed by the deletion of the .git repository still does exactly what you want, using Git repositories. How would this answer be the "least worse" when it doesn't even use Git repositories? I'm not going to downvote this answer because the answerer is visibly trying to help and this is a reasonable workaround for GitHub, but this doesn't actually answer the question.
that command would not be an exact equivalent to svn export simply because it requires a post-cleanup step (deleting the .git folder) and the original Subversion command doesn't
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For your I still don't know what the heck this is: git clone --bare will clone the repository without a working copy. This is usually done on a central repository so as to minimise disk space usage.

Bruno / King Crunch have the best answer. Although you could use git bash / cygwin to allow you to pipe if you need a one-liner.

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3 Comments

This is about the opposite of --depth 1, though.
Yes I realise that, but Andres mentioned that he did not know what git clone --bare did.
I edited the answer so this will be more obvious. (And in this form I can even vote it up.)
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This is a rather old questions, nevertheless I didn't find an "obvious solution" in my opinion. After some research of the git documentation I found:

git archive --format=tar --remote ... | tar xf -

This will receive the contents even from a remote repository and write a tar archive to stdout. The tar command then will extract the contents and create it in your current directory.

If you like to do that from a local repository (which was explicitly not the desired request in the question), then

git archive --format=tar ... | ( cd /your/path && tar xf - )

will do the trick for you. The first approach works on Windows command prompt as well, if you have tar installed. The latter most probably does not and may overwrite your directory.

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1

Re your point, git archive <- This would be the perfect solution ...but it only has 2 possible formats: tar or zip, you can add new formats using documentation from the EXAMPLES section of the git-archive(1) man page:

   git config tar.tar.xz.command "xz -c"
       Configure a "tar.xz" format for making LZMA-compressed tarfiles.
       You can use it specifying --format=tar.xz, or by creating an output
       file like -o foo.tar.xz.

While being "on Windows" is generally considered an impediment to many tasks, with a little extra work, you can almost catch up to the folks running other operating systems by using software like Cygwin or MKS Toolkit.

If after confirming that whatever command you need is available from within your shell, this sort of git config … command still doesn't work for you, then you should perhaps post additional details about your configuration in a question on SuperUser.com.

As noted by jbruni in the comments, you can list the available formats for your installation using git archive --list.

Note that "git archive --list extra garbage"(man) silently ignored excess command line parameters, which has been corrected with Git 2.44 (Q1 2024).

See commit d6b6cd1 (21 Dec 2023) by Junio C Hamano (gitster).
(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 6bf317d, 08 Jan 2024)

archive: "--list" does not take further options

"git archive --list blah"(man) should notice an extra command line parameter that goes unused.
Make it so.

The error message would now be:

extra command line parameter 'blah'
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6 Comments

wow, I can't believe git-archive can be configured with custom formats, but cannot be tweaked to have no format at all!!! seriously, it's not that I don't know or don't want to install cygwin or other shell, it's that I'm running this operation in a buildagent in which I don't want to install anything (because I actually don't have control over it)
What would the output of "no format at all" look like? The purpose of "git archive" is to create an archive. That implicitly requires some kind of format. Add a freely available tar.exe to your build server, then try setting git config tar.deploy.command "tar -x -C /path/to/target -f -" and extract on the fly. NONE of your tools are perfect. Sure, git's architecture fails to compensate for other failures in your build environment, but that's what you've got. Just do what you can with the tools available.
Woot, an anonymous downvote. Care to mention how this answer is inaccurate or misleading?
You can list the available formats for your installation using git archive --list. For my installation, I'm seeing tar, tez, tar.gz, and .zip.
@jbruni .. Yes -- on my system, I see .tgz as well. It might not have been clear from the formatting I used back in 2012, but the bold bit in the first paragraph was actually quoting the question. Since the OP was clear that he had only 2 formats available, I was trying to provide a way to add more.
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From https://stackoverflow.com/a/160719/43597

git checkout-index -a -f --prefix=/destination/path/
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1 Comment

Useless answer, as this needs to be done from a repository that has already been cloned. What we want to avoid is to do two steps instead of one (svn export is one step, git clone + git checkout-index is two steps).

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