Git clone branch-How do I clone a single branch in Git?

Question

I have a local Git repository called 'skeleton' that I use for storing project skeletons. It has a few branches, for different kinds of projects:

casey@agave [~/Projects/skeleton] git branch

* master

  rails

  c

  c++

If I want to check out the master branch for a new project, I can do

casey@agave [~/Projects] git clone skeleton new

Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/casey/Projects/new/.git/

and everything is how I want it. Specifically, the new master branch points to the skeleton master branch, and I can push and pull to move around changes to the basic project setup.

What doesn't work, however, is if I want to clone another branch. I can't get it so that I only pull the branch I want, for instance, the rails branch, and then the new repository has a master branch that pushes to and pulls from the skeleton repository's rails branch, by default.

Is there a good way to go about doing this? Or, maybe this isn't the way that Git wants me to structure things, and I'm certainly open to that. Perhaps I should have multiple repositories, with the Ruby on Rails skeleton repository tracking the master skeleton repository? And any individual project cloning the Ruby on Rails skeleton repository.

Answer 1

In git 1.7.10 it allows the user to clone a single branch using:

git clone --single-branch

as in:

git clone <url> --branch <branch> --single-branch [<folder>]

And since Git 1.9.0, shallow clones support data transfer (push/pull) using:

git clone --depth 1

so this option is even more useful now. And this is the easiest way to reduce the bandwidth.

Refer: 

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-clone#Documentation/git-clone.txt---depthltdepthgt

For more commands like this please go through the following tutorial that will help you understand the git