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

Note: the git1.7.10 (April 2012) actually allows you to clone only one branch:

# clone only the remote primary HEAD (default: origin/master)
git clone --single-branch

as in:
git clone <url> --branch <branch> --single-branch [<folder>]

You can see it in t5500-fetch-pack.sh:

test_expect_success 'single branch clone' '
  git clone --single-branch "file://$(pwd)/." singlebranch
'

Tobu comments that:

This is implicit when doing a shallow clone.
This makes git clone --depth 1 the easiest way to save bandwidth.

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+)

# unshallow the current branch
git fetch --unshallow

# for getting back all the branches (see Peter Cordes' comment)
git config remote.origin.fetch refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
git fetch --unshallow

As Chris comments:

the magic line for getting missing branches to reverse --single-branch is (git v2.1.4):

git config remote.origin.fetch +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
git fetch --unshallow  

Answer 2

From git-clone man page:

--single-branch is your friend during clone remember to use with --branch <branch name> or only remote primary HEAD will be cloned (master by default)

Always remember to do Ctrl + F5 to read fresh source, not the one from cache :-) (I didn't so didn't know about this option for long time.)

Answer 3

One way is to execute the following.

git clone user@git-server:project_name.git -b branch_name /your/folder

Where branch_name is the branch of your choice and "/your/folder" is the destination folder for that branch. It's true that this will bring other branches giving you the opportunity to merge back and forth. Now, starting with Git 1.7.10, you can now do this

git clone user@git-server:project_name.git -b branch_name --single-branch /your/folder

Answer 4

git clone <url> --branch <branch> --single-branch

Just put in URL and branch name.

Answer 5

Can be done in 2 steps

1. Clone the repository

   • git clone <http url>

2. Checkout the branch you want

   • git checkout $BranchName

Answer 6

You can do it by using the below command:

git clone -b branch_name --single-branch project_url local_folder_to_clone_in