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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.

Helping businesses build developer-led adoption for 10+ yrs.
VP of Developer Relations and Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member.

๐Ÿ“Ÿ Edutainer at Node.js CLI Automation course (100 videos ยท 22 Projects) & VSCode.pro course. Over 36K devs learning. ๐ŸŽฉ Award-winning Open Source Engineer & Dev Advocate ๐ŸฆŠ Google Developers Expert Web DevRel ๐Ÿš€ Mars Ingenuity Helicopter code contributor ๐Ÿ† 8th GitHub Stars Award recipient ๐ŸŒณ Node.js foundation Community Committee Outreach Lead, Member Linux Foundation, OpenAPI Business Governing Board, and DigitalOcean Navigator.

โœŒ๏ธ Author of various open-source dev-tools and software libraries used by millions of developers worldwide โ“ฆ WordPress Core Developer ๐Ÿ“ฃ TEDx Speaker with 100+ international talks.

โœจ As quoted by: Satya Nadella ยท CEO of Microsoft โ€” Awais is an awesome example for developers.
๐Ÿ™Œ Leading developers and publishing technical content for over a decade ๐Ÿ’œ Loves his wife (Maedah) โฏ Read more about Ahmad Awais.

๐Ÿ‘‹โ€ฆ Awais is mostly active on Twitter @MrAhmadAwais

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