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 clonefollowed by removing the.gitrepository directory.git checkout-indexalludes to this functionality but starts with "Just read the desired tree into the index…" which I’m not entirely sure how to do.git-exportis a third-party script that essentially does agit cloneinto a temporary location followed byrsync --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 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.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.
ZIP archive:
git help archivefor 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
(See Greg’s answer for more details)
Here’s a real-world example using libchrony on Linux:
Those commands produce a zip file and extract it into
$HOME/dev/libchrony. We can peek into the archive using: