Ahmad Awais

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Shallow Clone a Large Git Repository Quickly

Ahmad AwaisAhmad Awais

Say you have a large git repository say 1 GB or even bigger. It may have a lot of branches and a long history. You now want to clone it to make some changes and create a pull request. Cloning it in its entirety with git clone would be a bad idea. Instead, do this:

git clone -b <branch> <url> --depth=1

A practical example would be:

git clone -b master https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby --depth=1

The giant 735.03 MB Gatsby repository, cloned this way is about 680 MB in size. I read that Jira is 677MB, with the working directory being another 320MB, when you clone this way.

Explanation:#

You can work this magic when pulling down the code as well:

git pull --rebase origin <branch> --depth=1

A practical example would be:

git pull --rebase origin master --depth=1

That’s about it. You are now shallow cloning and pulling your git repo. It doesn’t make that huge of an impact but I like to stay minimal as far as I can.

Use your code for good.

Founder & CEO of ⌘ Command Code coding agent with taste. Founded Langbase.com, AI cloud to build, deploy, and scale AI agents with tools & memory · Creator of Command.new.

"Awais is an awesome example for developers" — Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.

NASA Mars Ingenuity Helicopter mission code contributor 8th GitHub Stars Award recipient with 5x GitHub Stars Award (Listed as GitHub's #1 JavaScript trending developer). Google Developers Expert Web DevRel.

Ex VP Eng (DevTools & DevRel) Rapid · Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member · AI/ML/DevTools Angel Investor (Replit, Resend, Daytona, Gumroad and you?) ❯ AI/ML Advisory Board San Francisco, DevNetwork.

Award-winning Open Source Engineering leader authored hundreds of open-source dev-tools and software libraries used by millions of developers, including Shades of Purple code theme and corona-cli.

Linux Foundation (Node.js Committee Lead), OpenAPI Business Governing Board. Taught 108K+ developers via NodeCLI.com and VSCode.pro course. 274 million views, blogging for 24 yrs.

❯ Read more about Ahmad Awais or come say hi on 𝕏 @_AhmadAwais.

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