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:
git clone
followed by removing the .git
repository directory.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.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.
Probably the simplest way to achieve this is with git archive
. If you really need just the expanded tree you can do something like this.
git archive master | tar -x -C /somewhere/else
Most of the time that I need to 'export' something from git, I want a compressed archive in any case so I do something like this.
git archive master | bzip2 >source-tree.tar.bz2
ZIP archive:
git archive --format zip --output /full/path/to/zipfile.zip master
git help archive
for more details, it's quite flexible.
Be aware that even though the archive will not contain the .git directory, it will, however, contain other hidden git-specific files like .gitignore, .gitattributes, etc. If you don't want them in the archive, make sure you use the export-ignore attribute in a .gitattributes file and commit this before doing your archive. Read more...
Note: If you are interested in exporting the index, the command is
git checkout-index -a -f --prefix=/destination/path/
(See Greg's answer for more details)