How to pull specific directory with git

Question

I have a project with git, and I just want to clone or pull a specific directory, like myproject/javascript just like subversion does.
make some changes, commit and push back again.
It's possible?

Answer 1

1. cd into the top of your repo copy
2. git fetch

3. git checkout HEAD path/to/your/dir/or/file

   • Where "path/..." in (3) starts at the directory just below the repo root containing your ".../file"

   • NOTE that instead of "HEAD", the hash code of a specific commit may be used, and then you will get the revision (file) or revisions (dir) specific to that commit.

Answer 2

In an empty directory:

git init
git remote add [REMOTE_NAME] [GIT_URL]
git fetch REMOTE_NAME
git checkout REMOTE_NAME/BRANCH -- path/to/directory

Answer 3

After much looking for an answer, not finding, giving up, trying again and so on, I finally found a solution to this in another SO thread:

How to git-pull all but one folder

To copy-paste what's there:

git init
git remote add -f origin <url>
git config core.sparsecheckout true
echo <dir1>/ >> .git/info/sparse-checkout
echo <dir2>/ >> .git/info/sparse-checkout
echo <dir3>/ >> .git/info/sparse-checkout
git pull origin master

To do what OP wants (work on only one dir), just add that one dir to .git/info/sparse-checkout, when doing the steps above.

Many many thanks to @cforbish !

Answer 4

It's not possible. You need pull all repository or nothing.

Answer 5

Maybe this command can be helpful :

git archive --remote=MyRemoteGitRepo --format=tar BranchName_or_commit  path/to/your/dir/or/file > files.tar

"Et voilà"

Answer 6

git clone --filter from Git 2.19

This option will actually skip fetching unneeded objects from the server.

I have written a detailed answer explaining current support status at: How do I clone a subdirectory only of a Git repository?

It is very likely that whatever gets implemented for git clone in that area will also have git pull analogues.

Answer 7

Sometimes, you just want to have a look at previous copies of files without the rigmarole of going through the diffs.

In such a case, it's just as easy to make a clone of a repository and checkout the specific commit that you are interested in and have a look at the subdirectory in that cloned repository. Because everything is local you can just delete this clone when you are done.