Getting a single revision from Git

Question

Having the full Git revision history has a lot of benefits as part of the development process.

But our product is the source code, we are using scripted languages that don't need compilation or processing, and then the Git history becomes a burden on deployment- in our example we deploy a clean virtual environment following every change, having several deployments on a single machine.

There are some ways to reduce the amount of history, for example shallow clones whose efficiency depends on how deep the revision is in the branch, doing a fetch instead of clone but then you still get history from the revision and back, or getting the full repo once then pull when needed but this is wasteful in terms of disk space and tends to be less reliable.

Is there a way to get a single revision from Git without it's history ?

Answer 1

Shallow clone

You can indeed get a shallow clone out of Git using:

git clone --depth=1 <url>

This will still clone the repo and create a .git folder with the objects, only smaller in size (difference depending on your total file size vs. history size).

Git archive

You can also use git-archive to extract an archive of the repo:

Creates an archive of the specified format containing the tree structure for the named tree, and writes it out to the standard output. If is specified it is prepended to the filenames in the archive.

In the examples it shows for instance:

git archive --format=tar --prefix=git-1.4.0/ v1.4.0 | gzip >git-1.4.0.tar.gz

Create a compressed tarball for v1.4.0 release.

Hosted Git, archive API

If you are hosting your repo on GitHub, then you can use their archive API:

https://api.github.com/repos/<username>/<repository>/zipball/<commit_hash>

Bitbucket.org has a same functionality for this:

https://bitbucket.org/<username>/<repository>/get/<branch_name|commit_hash|tag>.zip

Answer 2

Don't deploy your git repo. Develop a real deployment methodology. Even if it's as simple as tarring up an archive (= building an artifact with just the necessary files in it to be deployed) of deployed scripts.

Even if you shallow-clone the tip of your source repository, you likely don't need unit tests, documentation, linting profiles, and other supporting ephemera in your deployed environment.

Note: for repositories of scripted languages that don't really have a "build" step, a trivial way to release an artifact would be to package them in an archive, such as tar or rpm. Then, to "deploy", you untar the archive or install the rpm. this removes the need for git tooling in your deploy chain (not all prod servers will have those dev tools).

Answer 3

Question is there a way to get a single revision from Git without it's history ?

To get a repository, no there's no way, mainly because there's no 'revision'. Git store commits, which are changes from previous state.
If you want your repository at a specific point in time you have to pull the commit at this time and all it's ancestors or you'll get only the changes made in the commit.

To avoid confusion: Shallow cloning is getting the needed history and then truncating it to free space, the tree is still made from history.

For the solutions, @7ochem answer does cover them.