Do a “git export” (like “svn export”)?

Question

I\'ve been wondering whether there is a good \"git export\" solution that creates a copy of a tree without the .git repository directory. There are at least thr

Answer 1

If you need submodules as well, this should do the trick: https://github.com/meitar/git-archive-all.sh/wiki

Answer 2

I found out what option 2 means. From a repository, you can do:

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

The slash at the end of the path is important, otherwise it will result in the files being in /destination with a prefix of 'path'.

Since in a normal situation the index contains the contents of the repository, there is nothing special to do to "read the desired tree into the index". It's already there.

The -a flag is required to check out all files in the index (I'm not sure what it means to omit this flag in this situation, since it doesn't do what I want). The -f flag forces overwriting any existing files in the output, which this command doesn't normally do.

This appears to be the sort of "git export" I was looking for.

Answer 3

From the Git Manual:

Using git-checkout-index to "export an entire tree"

The prefix ability basically makes it trivial to use git-checkout-index as an "export as tree" function. Just read the desired tree into the index, and do:

$ git checkout-index --prefix=git-export-dir/ -a

Answer 4

I use git-submodules extensively. This one works for me:

rsync -a ./FROM/ ./TO --exclude='.*'

Answer 5

I have another solution that works fine if you have a local copy of the repository on the machine where you would like to create the export. In this case move to this repository directory, and enter this command:

GIT_WORK_TREE=outputdirectory git checkout -f

This is particularly useful if you manage a website with a git repository and would like to checkout a clean version in /var/www/. In this case, add thiscommand in a .git/hooks/post-receive script (hooks/post-receive on a bare repository, which is more suitable in this situation)

Answer 6

Probably the simplest way to achieve this is with git archive. If you really need just the expanded tree you can do something like this.

git archive master | tar -x -C /somewhere/else

Most of the time that I need to 'export' something from git, I want a compressed archive in any case so I do something like this.

git archive master | bzip2 >source-tree.tar.bz2

ZIP archive:

git archive --format zip --output /full/path/to/zipfile.zip master 

git help archive for more details, it's quite flexible.

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Be aware that even though the archive will not contain the .git directory, it will, however, contain other hidden git-specific files like .gitignore, .gitattributes, etc. If you don't want them in the archive, make sure you use the export-ignore attribute in a .gitattributes file and commit this before doing your archive. Read more...

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Note: If you are interested in exporting the index, the command is

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

(See Greg's answer for more details)