Is it possible to do a sparse checkout without checking out the whole repository first?

Question

I\'m working with a repository with a very large number of files that takes hours to checkout. I\'m looking into the possibility of whether Git would work well with this kin

Answer 1

In my case, I want to skip the Pods folder when cloning the project. I did step by step like below and it works for me. Hope it helps.

mkdir my_folder
cd my_folder
git init
git remote add origin -f 
git config core.sparseCheckout true 
echo '!Pods/*\n/*' > .git/info/sparse-checkout
git pull origin master

Memo, If you want to skip more folders, just add more line in sparse-checkout file.