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

Now we can! As this is the first result on google, I thought I'd update this to the latest standing. With the advent of git 1.7.9.5, we have the git archive command which will allow you to retrieve a single file from a remote host.

git archive --remote=git://git.foo.com/project.git HEAD:path/in/repo filename | tar -x

See answer in full here https://stackoverflow.com/a/5324532/290784