How to sparsely checkout only one single file from a git repository?

Question

How do I checkout just one file from a git repo?

Answer 1

Normally it's not possible to download just one file from git without downloading the whole repository as suggested in the first answer. It's because Git doesn't store files as you think (as CVS/SVN do), but it generates them based on the entire history of the project.

But there are some workarounds for specific cases. Examples below with placeholders for user, project, branch, filename.

GitHub

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/user/project/branch/filename

GitLab

wget https://gitlab.com/user/project/raw/branch/filename

GitWeb

If you're using Git on the Server - GitWeb, then you may try in example (change it into the right path):

wget "http://example.com/gitweb/?p=example;a=blob_plain;f=README.txt;hb=HEAD"

GitWeb at drupalcode.org

Example:

wget "http://drupalcode.org/project/ads.git/blob_plain/refs/heads/master:/README.md"

googlesource.com

There is an undocumented feature that allows you to download base64-encoded versions of raw files:

curl "https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/net/+/master/http/transport_security_state_static.json?format=TEXT" | base64 --decode

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In other cases check if your Git repository is using any web interfaces.

If it's not using any web interface, you may consider to push your code to external services such as GitHub, Bitbucket, etc. and use it as a mirror.

If you don't have wget installed, try curl -O (url) alternatively.