unable to curl a git tag

Question

I want to curl a git tag through the command line:

curl -O http://someurl

But when I try to untar the file it is broken? Do anyone know what is the problem?

Answer 1

You can curl a git tag from a git repos hosting service like GitHub, because it has a dedicated tarball service (like Nodeload) which provides tar (or zip). But not any other git repo out there has that same service.

See "Having trouble downloading Git archive tarballs from Private Repo" for a concrete example with GitHub (or this curl GitHub tutorial):

curl -sL --user "${username}:${password}" https://github.com/$account/$repo/tarball/$tag_name > tarball.tar

On a public repo:

curl -L https://github.com/pinard/Pymacs/tarball/v0.24-beta2 | tar zx

Answer 2

git itself doesn't provide a http-interface. A solution is to use git archive instead

git clone http://example.com/myrepo.git
git archive mytag > myrepo-mytag.tar.gz

Answer 3

If you need to fetch only the minimum necessary,

git init temp
cd temp
git remote add x http://example.com/repo.git
git fetch x sometag --depth=1
git archive FETCH_HEAD > ../repo.sometag.tgz
cd ..
rm -rf temp

will do ya