26

Is it possible to “checkout” to a location outside of the repository? What I mean is a clone of a branch without the “.git” directory.

For example: Use git to manage a website. You edit some files, commit and copy the files to a web server via WebDAV. The WebDAV-path would be the location outside the repository, which shouldn't contain the “.git”.

This may not be the problem for which git was build, but is this possible?

slhck
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user240826
  • 361

3 Answers3

21

Yes, this is certainly possible.

Lets say I have a bare repository named /srv/production.git on the destination system/server.

On the destination system I can use the command cd /srv/production.git; GIT_WORK_TREE=/srv/production-www/ git checkout -f

If I am in a non-bare repository the command is slightly different. Lets say I have a non-bare respository at /srv/testing. To checkout that I would use cd /srv/testing/.git; GIT_WORK_TREE=/srv/production-www/ git checkout -f

In fact on my system I even automate this in a post-commit hook in my production.git repository. So when you push to production.git the latest version is automatically check out to the web root.

#!/bin/sh
#
# An example hook script that is called after a successful
# commit is made.
#
# To enable this hook, rename this file to "post-commit".

GIT_WORK_TREE=/srv/production-www/ git checkout -f
# ... misc other commands to verify permissions are set correctly.

If your only access to the remote system is webdav, it certainly should be possible to write a post-commit hook that will checkout to the webdav host, either directly or to a temporary location, which you can then script an upload.

Tobias Kienzler
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Zoredache
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10

If you just want the files, you can use git archive. Usually it writes to an archive like tarballs or ZIP, but you can pipe it as well:

git archive master | tar -x -C /some/path

Here, master obviously is the branch you want to archive, and /some/path will contain just the files – no .git or .gitignore.

Or you can use git checkout-index which more closely resembles a "checkout" of files:

git checkout-index -f -a --prefix=/some/path/

Here, the -a option tells git to check out all files. The prefix will be prepended to the output. Somebody also wrote a wrapper around this to give a git export.

slhck
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3

Since Git 1.8.5, you can use -C <path> option, to run as if git was started in <path>, instead of the current working directory.

On older Git versions, use --work-tree option. For example::

repo_url=https://github.com/owner/project.git
repo_dir=$(basename $repo_url .git)
git clone $repo_url
git --work-tree=$repo_dir checkout $branch
Noam Manos
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