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

Sadly none of the above worked for me so I spent very long time trying different combination of sparse-checkout file.

In my case I wanted to skip folders with IntelliJ IDEA configs.

Here is what I did:

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Run git clone https://github.com/myaccount/myrepo.git --no-checkout

Run git config core.sparsecheckout true

Created .git\info\sparse-checkout with following content

!.idea/*
!.idea_modules/*
/*

Run 'git checkout --' to get all files.

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Critical thing to make it work was to add /* after folder's name.

I have git 1.9