How do I clone, fetch or sparse checkout a single directory or a list of directories from git repository?

Question

How do I clone, fetch or sparse checkout a single file or directory or a list of files or directories from a git repository avoiding downloading the entire history or at lea

Answer 1

This bash function below does the trick.

function git_sparse_checkout {
    # git repository, e.g.: http://github.com/frgomes/bash-scripts
    local url=$1
    # directory where the repository will be downloaded, e.g.: ./build/sources
    local dir=$2
    # repository name, in general taken from the url, e.g.: bash-scripts
    local prj=$3
    # tag, e.g.: master
    local tag=$4
    [[ ( -z "$url" ) || ( -z "$dir" ) || ( -z "$prj" ) || ( -z "$tag" ) ]] && \
        echo "ERROR: git_sparse_checkout: invalid arguments" && \
        return 1
    shift; shift; shift; shift

    # Note: any remaining arguments after these above are considered as a
    # list of files or directories to be downloaded.

    mkdir -p ${dir}
    if [ ! -d ${dir}/${prj} ] ;then
        mkdir -p ${dir}/${prj}
        pushd ${dir}/${prj}
        git init
        git config core.sparseCheckout true
        local path="" # local scope
        for path in $* ;do
            echo "${path}" >> .git/info/sparse-checkout
        done
        git remote add origin ${url}
        git fetch --depth=1 origin ${tag}
        git checkout ${tag}
        popd
    fi
}

This is an example of how to use it:

function example_download_scripts {
  url=http://github.com/frgomes/bash-scripts
  dir=$(pwd)/build/sources
  prj=bash-scripts
  tag=master
  git_sparse_checkout $url $dir $prj $tag "user-install/*" sysadmin-install/install-emacs.sh
}

In the example above, notice that a directory must be followed by /* and must be between single quotes or double quotes.