Do a "git export" (like "svn export")?

Question

I've been wondering whether there is a good "git export" solution that creates a copy of a tree without the `.git` repository directory. There are at least three methods I know of: - `git clone` followed by removing the `.git` repository directory. - `git checkout-index` alludes to this functionality but starts with "Just read the desired tree into the index..." which I'm not entirely sure how to do. - `git-export` is a third-party script that essentially does a `git clone` into a temporary location followed by `rsync --exclude='.git'` into the final destination. None of these solutions really strike me as being satisfactory. The closest one to `svn export` might be option 1, because both require the target directory to be empty first. But option 2 seems even better, assuming I can figure out what it means to read a tree into the index.

Accepted Answer

Probably the simplest way to achieve this is with `git archive`. If you really need just the expanded tree you can do something like this.

```
git archive master | tar -x -C /somewhere/else
```

Most of the time that I need to 'export' something from git, I want a compressed archive in any case so I do something like this.

```
git archive master | bzip2 >source-tree.tar.bz2
```

ZIP archive:

```
git archive --format zip --output /full/path/to/zipfile.zip master 
```

`git help archive` for more details, it's quite flexible.

Be aware that even though the archive will not contain the .git directory, it will, however, contain other hidden git-specific files like .gitignore, .gitattributes, etc. If you don't want them in the archive, make sure you use the export-ignore attribute in a .gitattributes file and commit this before doing your archive. Read more...

Note: If you are interested in exporting the index, the command is

```
git checkout-index -a -f --prefix=/destination/path/
```

(See Greg's answer for more details)

Here's a real-world example using libchrony on Linux:

```
mkdir $HOME/dev
cd $HOME/dev
pushd /tmp
git clone https://gitlab.com/chrony/libchrony.git
cd libchrony
BRANCH=$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)
git archive -o ../libchrony.zip --prefix="libchrony/" $BRANCH
popd
unzip /tmp/libchrony.zip
```

Those commands produce a zip file and extract it into `$HOME/dev/libchrony`. We can peek into the archive using:

```
$ unzip -v /tmp/libchrony
Archive:  /tmp/libchrony.zip
e0a3807f770b56f6b0e9833254baa7c4fc13564b
 Length   Method    Size  Cmpr    Date    Time   CRC-32   Name
--------  ------  ------- ---- ---------- ----- --------  ----
       0  Stored        0   0% 2023-07-20 09:37 00000000  libchrony/
      49  Defl:N       47   4% 2023-07-20 09:37 37c3f2e2  libchrony/.gitignore
   26530  Defl:N     9350  65% 2023-07-20 09:37 5622583e  libchrony/COPYING
     961  Defl:N      467  51% 2023-07-20 09:37 da9221e3  libchrony/Makefile
     475  Defl:N      304  36% 2023-07-20 09:37 cae27f70  libchrony/README.adoc
    3313  Defl:N     1119  66% 2023-07-20 09:37 37eb110f  libchrony/chrony.h
    7673  Defl:N     2261  71% 2023-07-20 09:37 5d455a52  libchrony/client.c
    6190  Defl:N     2093  66% 2023-07-20 09:37 7ea9d81b  libchrony/example-reports.c
   16348  Defl:N     3855  76% 2023-07-20 09:37 e82f5fe3  libchrony/message.c
    2946  Defl:N     1099  63% 2023-07-20 09:37 945ee82b  libchrony/message.h
--------          -------  ---                            -------
   64485            20595  68%                            10 files
```

Do a "git export" (like "svn export")?

Solution

Problem

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