First, clone a remote Git repository and cd into it:
$ git clone git://example.com/myproject
$ cd myproject
Next, look at the local branches in your repository:
$ git branch
* master
But there are other branches hiding in your repository! You can see these using the -a flag:
$ git branch -a
* master
remotes/origin/HEAD
remotes/origin/master
remotes/origin/v1.0-stable
remotes/origin/experimental
If you just want to take a quick peek at an upstream branch, you can check it out directly:
$ git checkout origin/experimental
But if you want to work on that branch, you'll need to create a local tracking branch which is done automatically by:
$ git checkout experimental
and you will see
Branch experimental set up to track remote branch experimental from origin.
Switched to a new branch 'experimental'
Here, "new branch" simply means that the branch is taken from the index and created locally for you. As the previous line tells you, the branch is being set up to track the remote branch, which usually means the origin/branch_name branch.
Now, if you look at your local branches, this is what you'll see:
$ git branch
* experimental
master
You can actually track more than one remote repository using git remote.
$ git remote add win32 git://example.com/users/joe/myproject-win32-port
$ git branch -a
* master
remotes/origin/HEAD
remotes/origin/master
remotes/origin/v1.0-stable
remotes/origin/experimental
remotes/win32/master
remotes/win32/new-widgets
At this point, things are getting pretty crazy, so run gitk to see what's going on:
$ gitk --all &
The easiest way would be to find the head commit of the branch as it was immediately before the rebase started in the reflog...
git reflog
and to reset the current branch to it (with the usual caveats about being absolutely sure before reseting with the --hard option).
Suppose the old commit was HEAD@{2} in the ref log:
git reset --hard HEAD@{2}
In Windows, you may need to quote the reference:
git reset --hard "HEAD@{2}"
You can check the history of the candidate old head by just doing a git log HEAD@{2} (Windows: git log "HEAD@{2}").
If you've not disabled per branch reflogs you should be able to simply do git reflog branchname@{1} as a rebase detaches the branch head before reattaching to the final head. I would double check this, though as I haven't verified this recently.
Per default, all reflogs are activated for non-bare repositories:
[core]
logAllRefUpdates = true
Best Solution
What you are trying to do is called a sparse checkout, and that feature was added in git 1.7.0 (Feb. 2012). The steps to do a sparse clone are as follows:
This creates an empty repository with your remote, and fetches all objects but doesn't check them out. Then do:
Now you need to define which files/folders you want to actually check out. This is done by listing them in
.git/info/sparse-checkout, eg:Last but not least, update your empty repo with the state from the remote:
You will now have files "checked out" for
some/dirandanother/sub/treeon your file system (with those paths still), and no other paths present.You might want to have a look at the extended tutorial and you should probably read the official documentation for sparse checkout and read-tree.
As a function:
Usage:
Note that this will still download the whole repository from the server – only the checkout is reduced in size. At the moment it is not possible to clone only a single directory. But if you don't need the history of the repository, you can at least save on bandwidth by creating a shallow clone. See udondan's answer below for information on how to combine shallow clone and sparse checkout.
As of git 2.25.0 (Jan 2020) an experimental sparse-checkout command is added in git: