How do I clone a single branch in Git?

Question

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.

Answer 1

For cloning a branch of Git you don't have the public key to, use this:

git clone -b <branch> <Git repository URL or clone URL you get from Git repository>

Answer 2

1. Open Git Bash shell.
2. Create an directory in your file system where you want to checkout.
   • $ mkdir Feature_develop_branch
3. Change directory to Feature_develop_branch folder.
   • $ cd Feature_develop_branch
4. Clone the repository using external clone URL.
   • $ git clone https://someurl.repositoryName.git
5. After cloning, change the directory to created repositoryName.
   • $ cd /repositoryName
6. Check out the branch.
   • $ git checkout <Branch Name>

Answer 3

Open the cmd.

cd folder_name (enter the path where to clone the branch)

Just one command:

git clone url_of_projecturltoclone -b branch_name

Answer 4

Clone only one branch. This is the easiest way:

$ git clone -b BRANCH_NAME --single-branch [e-mail]:___/PROJECTNAME.git

Answer 5

After cloning was complete, I had to enter git submodule update --init --recursive to download all submodules

Answer 6

You can try the long-winded way:

mkdir newrepo.git
cd newrepo.git
git init
git remote add origin file:///path/to/original
git fetch origin branchiwant:refs/remotes/origin/branchiwant
git checkout -b branchiwant --track origin/branchiwant

What this does is:

• Create and init an empty Git repository.
• Adds the original repository as a remote called origin.
• Fetches only the branch you require from the remote called origin.
• Creates and checks out a new branch that is set up to track the source branch you just cloned.

Hopefully that will be something like what you are after.