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@agave [~/Projects/skeleton] git branch
* master
rails
c
c++
If I want to check out the master branch for a new project, I can do
casey@agave [~/Projects] git clone skeleton new
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/casey/Projects/new/.git/
and everything is how I want it. Specifically, the new master branch points to the skeleton master branch, and I can push and pull to move around changes to the basic project setup.
What doesn't work, however, is if I want to clone another branch. I can't get it so that I only pull the branch I want, for instance the rails
branch, and then the new repository has a master
branch that pushes to and pulls from the skeleton repository's rails
branch, by default.
Is there a good way to go about doing this? Or, maybe this isn't the way that Git wants me to structure things, and I'm certainly open to that. Perhaps I should have multiple repositories, with the Ruby on Rails skeleton repository tracking the master skeleton repository? And any individual project cloning the Ruby on Rails skeleton repository.
Best Answer
Note: the git1.7.10 (April 2012) actually allows you to clone only one branch:
(
<url>
is the URL if the remote repository, and does not reference itself the branch cloned)You can see it in
t5500-fetch-pack.sh
:Tobu comments that:
And since Git 1.9.0 (February 2014), shallow clones support data transfer (push/pull), so that option is even more useful now.
See more at "Is
git clone --depth 1
(shallow clone) more useful than it makes out?"."Undoing" a shallow clone is detailed at "Convert shallow clone to full clone" (git 1.8.3+)
As Chris comments:
With Git 2.26 (Q1 2020), "
git clone --recurse-submodules --single-branch
" now uses the same single-branch option when cloning the submodules.See commit 132f600, commit 4731957 (21 Feb 2020) by Emily Shaffer (
nasamuffin
).(Merged by Junio C Hamano --
gitster
-- in commit b22db26, 05 Mar 2020)