Ahmad 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:
Ahmad Awaisgit clone -b <branch> <url> --depth=1A practical example would be:
git clone -b master https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby --depth=1The 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.
-b <branch> to define the exact branch you want to clone--depth=n to pull down only the latest n commitsYou can work this magic when pulling down the code as well:
git pull --rebase origin <branch> --depth=1A practical example would be:
git pull --rebase origin master --depth=1That’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, the most used coding agent for open models: 160K+ users, 50K+ paying customers. Founded Langbase (AI cloud for agents with memory & tools).
"What an awesome example for developers." — Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, on my NASA Ingenuity code.
NASA Ingenuity Mars Helicopter code contributor · 6× GitHub Star, one of the first 8 Gold Stars · #1 trending JavaScript developer on GitHub · 6× Google Developer Expert · 6× Microsoft MVP.
Ex VP DevRel & DevTools at RapidAPI · Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member · OpenAPI Business Governing Board, Linux Foundation · SF DevNetwork AI/ML Advisory Board · Angel investor (Replit, Resend, Daytona, Gumroad and you?).
Award-winning open source engineering leader: 300+ projects, 50–100M downloads a year, including Shades of Purple (5M+ developers) and corona-cli (10B+ queries).
Taught 217K+ developers via NodeCLI.com and VSCode.pro. 160+ talks. Blogging since 2000, billions of views.
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