Home/ Questions/Q 6733829
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-26T10:48:58+00:00

I have got a repository at github and several branches. The whole repo is

  • 0

I have got a repository at github and several branches. The whole repo is about 2 gigs. Before moving to git, I had an ant script that would checkout a folder from svn repository, build binary files and then commit back to the repository.

Unfortunately after switching to git, I can’t find a simple way to do it. Every time my ant script runs, I want it to get a fresh copy of folder from remote branch and commit back to it after doing some work. I do not want to download whole repsitory ( 2 GB of Data ) everytime I run ant script.

Here is an example of how my ant script looked with SVN

With GIT workflow looks like

  • GIT INIT
  • GIT CLONE http://project.branch15 ( 2 GB )
  • MODIFY SOME STUFF in /subfolder/subfolder/subfolder
  • COMMIT branch 15
Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This sounds like you have too much stuff in one repository. You should refactor it to use submodules. *If there is a folder than can live independent of their ancestors or siblings then it is a good candidate for a submodule.

    Git submodules are themselves git repositories and thus can be clones, checked out, modified and pushed to independent of the parent repository.

    You can also have a hierarchy of submodules. So in your example each subfolder could be a submodule. (but you should heed the above *).

    Another advantage of this approach is that you can clone the main repo (which might be 2GB) and assuming it is made up of some submodules (say 10 of ~200MB) without taking up the full 2GB. Then you can run submodule checkouts for the repos that you do want.

    Here is an example:

    File structure

      /MainApp/           
       /Utils    200MB
       /Lib    
^        /OSX    200MB
^        /WIN32  200MB
^        /WIN64  200MB  
^        /NIX    200MB 
       /Source   150MB 
                 =====
                 1.15GB

    If the ^ folders are each a submodule you could do the following

    $ git clone MainApp
  # Downloads the 200MB for Utils and the 150MB for Source (plus git files)
$ cd MainApp
$ git submodule update /Lib/OSX
  # Downloads the 200MB OSX folder
    • 0