- Published on
How to clone only specific folder in Git repo
When you don't need the whole repo.
- Authors
- Name
- Nico Prananta
- Follow me on Bluesky
Many open source projects include some examples in the same repository as the main code. This is common practice in the open source community. However, as a user of the project, you may only need some of the examples. In this blog post, I'll show you how to clone only the folders you need.
There's no direct way to clone only specific folders in the Git repo. To get just the folders you need, you have to
- clone the repo to the specified destination directory with minimal depth and no tree.
- set up the sparse checkout
- run the
git checkout.
This script will do the above:
#!/bin/bash
# Check if the correct number of arguments are passed
if [ "$#" -ne 3 ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 <git-url> <path-to-directory> <target-directory>"
exit 1
fi
# Variables from arguments
GIT_URL=$1
DIRECTORY_PATH=$2
TARGET_DIR=$3
# Cleanup function to remove the target directory on failure
cleanup() {
echo "An error occurred. Cleaning up the target directory..."
/bin/rm -rf "$TARGET_DIR"
echo "Cleanup complete."
}
# Cloning the repo into the specified target directory with minimal depth and no tree
git clone -n --depth=1 --filter=tree:0 "$GIT_URL" "$TARGET_DIR"
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
echo "Git clone failed."
cleanup
exit 1
fi
# Change directory to the specified target directory
cd "$TARGET_DIR"
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
echo "Failed to change directory to $TARGET_DIR"
cleanup
exit 1
fi
# Setup sparse checkout
git sparse-checkout set --no-cone "$DIRECTORY_PATH"
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
echo "Sparse-checkout setup failed."
cleanup
exit 1
fi
# Checkout the files
git checkout
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
echo "Git checkout failed."
cleanup
exit 1
fi
# Verify the contents of the checkout
if [ -z "$(ls -A $DIRECTORY_PATH)" ]; then
echo "Error: The specified path '$DIRECTORY_PATH' does not exist in the repository."
cleanup
exit 1
fi
echo "Checkout complete. The repository is located in '$TARGET_DIR'."
echo "To enter the directory, use: cd '$TARGET_DIR'"
I have named this script git-sparse-clone.sh. Let's see how to use it. Suppose you only want to clone the ai/edge-functions example from the supabase:
./git-sparse-clone.sh git@github.com:supabase/supabase.git examples/ai/edge-functions supabase-ai-edge
Running this command will create a directory called supabase-ai-edge in the current directory, containing the ai/edge-functions example.
By the way, I'm making a book about Pull Requests Best Practices. Check it out!