How to clone only a folder from a git submodule?

demula picture demula · Oct 5, 2010 · Viewed 54.9k times · Source

I'm trying to get just a folder from an external github repo to use in my project.

I want my project setup to be like this:

-my_project
    -submodule
        -code.py
    -MY_README
    -.git

And I have the remote repo named some-submodule with following structure:

-submodule
    -code.py
-README
-.gitignore

So I just want the submodule folder added to my project.

But I end up with this after

git submodule add http://github.com/user/submodule.git submodule

-my_project
    -submodule
        -submodule
            -code.py
        -README
        -.gitignore
    -MY_README
    -.gitignore

I am new to git so I really don't know if it possible using just git. If it is of some help I'm using msysgit on windows.

So, is there anyway that I can get a clean submodule folder in my project from a public repo?

If you're curious of exactly what I'm trying to do I'm trying to take directly from their repos these django plugins 1 2 to add them to my project.

Answer

dregad picture dregad · Sep 11, 2012

What you want to do is not feasible because you cannot clone a part of a repository.

See details in duplicate How to change a git submodule to point to a subfolder?