How do I clone a single branch in Git?

Question

I have a local Git repository called \'skeleton\' that I use for storing project skeletons. It has a few branches, for different kinds of projects:

casey@aga         


        

Answer 1

Similar to what @nosaiba-darwish said here: here

This is what we usually do in our company:

git clone -b <name_of_branch> --single-branch <git_url> folder_to_clone_locally

Answer 2

One way is to execute the following.

git clone user@git-server:project_name.git -b branch_name /your/folder

Where branch_name is the branch of your choice and "/your/folder" is the destination folder for that branch. It's true that this will bring other branches giving you the opportunity to merge back and forth.

Update

Now, starting with Git 1.7.10, you can now do this

git clone user@git-server:project_name.git -b branch_name --single-branch /your/folder

Answer 3

Let us take the example of flask repo. It has 3 branches in addition to master. Let us checkout the 1.1.x remote branch

clone the git repo

git clone https://github.com/pallets/flask

cd into the repo.

cd flask

fetch remote branch 1.1.x

git fetch origin 1.1.x

checkout the branch

git checkout 1.1.x

You will switch to the branch 1.1.x and it will track the remote 1.1.x branch.

Answer 4

git clone --branch {branch-name} {repo-URI}

Example:

git clone --branch dev https://github.com/ann/cleaningmachine.git

• dev: This is the {branch-name}
• https://github.com/ann/cleaningmachine.git: This is the {repo-URI}

Answer 5

Using Git version 1.7.3.1 (on Windows), here's what I do ($BRANCH is the name of the branch I want to checkout and $REMOTE_REPO is the URL of the remote repository I want to clone from):

mkdir $BRANCH
cd $BRANCH
git init
git remote add -t $BRANCH -f origin $REMOTE_REPO
git checkout $BRANCH

The advantage of this approach is that subsequent git pull (or git fetch) calls will also just download the requested branch.

Answer 6

You can try the long-winded way:

mkdir newrepo.git
cd newrepo.git
git init
git remote add origin file:///path/to/original
git fetch origin branchiwant:refs/remotes/origin/branchiwant
git checkout -b branchiwant --track origin/branchiwant

What this does is:

• Create and init an empty Git repository.
• Adds the original repository as a remote called origin.
• Fetches only the branch you require from the remote called origin.
• Creates and checks out a new branch that is set up to track the source branch you just cloned.

Hopefully that will be something like what you are after.