How do I download a specific git commit from a repository?

Question

I don\'t have a local code copy/etc, I just want to download a single specific git commit so I can view it. I have the url for the git repository:

git://git.kernel.o

Answer 1

In the general case, you can do this using the --remote flag to git archive, like so:

$ git archive -o repo.tar --remote= 

So in your example, you'd use:

$ git archive -o repo.tar --remote=git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net-2.6.git ee9c5cfad29c8a13199962614b9b16f1c4137ac9

That'll give you the state of the repo at that point in time. Note that you won't get the whole repo, so you can't actually interact with the upstream repo with what you've downloaded.

However, using git archive remotely has to be enabled server-side, and it isn't on the Linux kernel's Git server. You can, however, grab a copy by using a URL of the form http://git.kernel.org/?p=;a=snapshot;h=;sf=tgz. So for your repo, you could use, say, wget or curl to grab the file using that URL.