Clone just the sub-folder in GIT 🔥

#git #github #javascript #npm

Background

Hi there, Its Naman. I am sure that if you work with Git then you must have stumble across one of these situations at least once:

You need only one subfolder but don't want to clone the entire repo
You only need to play around the code and you don't care about the whole Git history.

For the first problem, there is no straightforward way/command available (Correct me if I am wrong). If the repo is small then you can clone the whole repo. Easy peasy, you won't think twice but if the repo is huge then you might think twice or maybe thrice. 😛

For the second problem, if you don't care about the code history then cloning history is overhead for you. We should skip if we can (A native way available but isn't friendly).

Solving problem 🛠 :

I found this awesome package DeGit, created by Rich Harris (Creator of RollupJS and Svelte) quite a while back. This package is way easy to install and use. I use it frequently.

Note: Before moving forward make sure you have Node.js installed in your system. I recommend installing Node.js via nvm(Node Version Manager)

1- Install npm package 📦

Use sudo npm i -g degit if your terminal shows permission error.

2- Cloning Sub-Folder ⬇️
Syntax: degit <repo-link/subfolder-name> <output-folder>

Here we are cloning components sub-folder and saving in our system with the same name.