Is it possible to do a sparse checkout without checking out the whole repository first?

Question

I\'m working with a repository with a very large number of files that takes hours to checkout. I\'m looking into the possibility of whether Git would work well with this kin

Answer 1

I had a similar use case, except I wanted to checkout only the commit for a tag and prune the directories. Using --depth 1 makes it really sparse and can really speed things up.

mkdir myrepo
cd myrepo
git init
git config core.sparseCheckout true
git remote add origin   # Note: no -f option
echo "path/within_repo/to/subdir/" > .git/info/sparse-checkout
git fetch --depth 1 origin tag 
git checkout