How to complete a git clone for a big project on an unstable connection?

git git-clone
LaPingvino picture LaPingvino · Oct 17, 2010 · Viewed 63.1k times · Source

I am trying to git clone the LibreOffice codebase, but at the moment I have an internet connection of about 300kbps and it's just anything but stable. I can get the connection back any moment, but then the git clone process already stopped working, and no way to get it running again. Is there some way to have a more failure-resistant git clone download?

One option I considered myself is to download someone else's .git directory, but that is overly dependent of others and doesn't seem like the best possible solution to me.

Answer

Jakub Narębski picture Jakub Narębski · Oct 18, 2010

Two solutions (or rather workarounds) that come to mind are:

  • Use shallow clone i.e. git clone --depth=1, then deepen this clone using git fetch --depth=N, with increasing N. You can use git fetch --unshallow (since 1.8.0.3) to download all remaining revisions.

  • Ask somebody to bundle up to some tagged release (see git-bundle(1) manpage). The bundle itself is an ordinary file, which you can download any way, via HTTP/FTP with resume support, via BitTorrent, via rsync, etc. The you can create clone from bundle, fix configuration, and do further fetches from official LibreOffice repository.

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