Create a Repository Archive with git

By  on  

Everything about git is amazing. And by "everything", I mean almost everything. As someone that used Perforce and SVN before learning git, I'm willing to ignore a few git annoyances since it makes branching and many other simple tasks easier. One good problem I have with git is that it's so powerful I don't know all of its features.

One feature I recently found out about is its archive feature which allows for exporting an entire repository to a zip or tar file.

# Format:  git archive {branchname} --format={compression} --output={filename}
git archive master --format=tar --output=kuma.tar

git archive some-feature-branch --format=tar --output=kuma.tar

Sure you could use any archiving utility to archive a given repo, this feature allows for quick archiving of any branch or repository state!

Recent Features

  • By
    Introducing MooTools Templated

    One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating: new Element Madness The first way to create UI-driven...

  • By
    Interview with a Pornhub Web Developer

    Regardless of your stance on pornography, it would be impossible to deny the massive impact the adult website industry has had on pushing the web forward. From pushing the browser's video limits to pushing ads through WebSocket so ad blockers don't detect them, you have...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Styling CSS Print Page Breaks

    It's important to construct your websites in a fashion that lends well to print. I use a page-break CSS class on my websites to tell the browser to insert a page break at strategic points on the page. During the development of my...

  • By
    HTML5’s placeholder Attribute

    HTML5 has introduced many features to the browser;  some HTML-based, some in the form of JavaScript APIs, but all of them useful.  One of my favorites if the introduction of the placeholder attribute to INPUT elements.  The placeholder attribute shows text in a field until the...

Discussion

  1. Andreas Krey

    The title is misleading, git archive only puts the tree of a single commit into the .tar file, not the entire branch’s history. Useful for creating a tar file to release a version.

    git bundle is what should be under this heading.

    • Kyll

      Hey, wouldn’t that make another nice entry?

  2. csibar

    Just a small correction: --format does not mean compression. It is – well – just the format of the archive, but it is not compressed at all.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!