Do a “git export” (like “svn export”)?

Question

I've been wondering whether there is a good "git export" solution that creates a copy of a tree without the .git repository directory. There are at least three methods I know of:

1. git clone followed by removing the .git repository directory.
2. git checkout-index alludes to this functionality but starts with "Just read the desired tree into the index..." which I'm not entirely sure how to do.
3. git-export is a third party script that essentially does a git clone into a temporary location followed by rsync --exclude='.git' into the final destination.

None of these solutions really strike me as being satisfactory. The closest one to svn export might be option 1, because both those require the target directory to be empty first. But option 2 seems even better, assuming I can figure out what it means to read a tree into the index.

Answer 1

I needed this for a deploy script and I couldn't use any of the above mentioned approaches. Instead I figured out a different solution:

#!/bin/sh
[ $# -eq 2 ] || echo "USAGE $0 REPOSITORY DESTINATION" && exit 1
REPOSITORY=$1
DESTINATION=$2
TMPNAME="/tmp/$(basename $REPOSITORY).$$"
git clone $REPOSITORY $TMPNAME
rm -rf $TMPNAME/.git
mkdir -p $DESTINATION
cp -r $TMPNAME/* $DESTINATION
rm -rf $TMPNAME

Answer 2

If you want something that works with submodules this might be worth a go.

Note:

• MASTER_DIR = a checkout with your submodules checked out also
• DEST_DIR = where this export will end up
• If you have rsync, I think you'd be able to do the same thing with even less ball ache.

Assumptions:

• You need to run this from the parent directory of MASTER_DIR ( i.e from MASTER_DIR cd .. )
• DEST_DIR is assumed to have been created. This is pretty easy to modify to include the creation of a DEST_DIR if you wanted to

cd MASTER_DIR && tar -zcvf ../DEST_DIR/export.tar.gz --exclude='.git*' . && cd ../DEST_DIR/ && tar xvfz export.tar.gz && rm export.tar.gz

Answer 3

This will copy all contents, minus the .dot files. I use this to export git cloned projects into my web app's git repo without the .git stuff.

cp -R ./path-to-git-repo /path/to/destination/

Plain old bash works just great :)

Answer 4

I just want to point out that in the case that you are

1. exporting a sub folder of the repository (that's how I used to use SVN export feature)
2. are OK with copying everything from that folder to the deployment destination
3. and since you already have a copy of the entire repository in place.

Then you can just use cp foo [destination] instead of the mentioned git-archive master foo | -x -C [destination].

Answer 5

I have another solution that works fine if you have a local copy of the repository on the machine where you would like to create the export. In this case move to this repository directory, and enter this command:

GIT_WORK_TREE=outputdirectory git checkout -f

This is particularly useful if you manage a website with a git repository and would like to checkout a clean version in /var/www/. In this case, add thiscommand in a .git/hooks/post-receive script (hooks/post-receive on a bare repository, which is more suitable in this situation)

Answer 6

You can archive a remote repo at any commit as zip file.

git archive --format=zip --output=archive.zip --remote=USERNAME@HOSTNAME:PROJECTNAME.git HASHOFGITCOMMIT