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 Langbase.com โ€” The most powerful serverless AI developer platform for building AI products ยท Ship agentic AI pipes, tools, and memory with BaseAI โ€” The first Web AI Framework (free, open-source, local-first, deploys serverless, agentic pipes, tools, and memory). Check out the State of AI Agents 2024.

Ex VP DevTools & DevRel Eng. Rapid ยท Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member. ๐Ÿง‘โ€๐Ÿ’ป AI/ML/DevTools Angel Investor โฏ AI/ML Advisory Board San Francisco, DevNetwork

๐ŸŽฉ Award-winning Open Source Engineer & Dev Advocate ๐ŸฆŠ Google Developers Expert Web DevRel ๐Ÿš€ NASA Mars Ingenuity Helicopter mission code contributor ๐Ÿ† 8th GitHub Stars Award recipient with 5x GitHub Stars Award (Listed as GitHub's #1 JavaScript trending developer).

๐ŸŒณ Node.js foundation Community Committee Outreach Lead, Member Linux Foundation, OpenAPI Business Governing Board, and DigitalOcean Navigator. ๐Ÿ“Ÿ Teaching thousands of developers Node.js CLI Automation and VSCode.pro course. Over 142 million views, 24 yrs Blogging, 108K developers learning, 200+ FOSS.

โœŒ๏ธ Author of various open-source dev-tools and software libraries utilized 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 Loves his wife (Maedah) โฏ Read more about Ahmad Awais.

๐Ÿ‘‹โ€ฆ Awais is mostly active on ๐• @MrAhmadAwais

๐Ÿ“จ

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