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

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Upload Photos to Flickr with PHP

    I have a bit of an obsession with uploading photos to different services thanks to Instagram. Instagram's iPhone app allows me to take photos and quickly filter them; once photo tinkering is complete, I can upload the photo to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and...

  • By
    Fancy Navigation with MooTools JavaScript

    Navigation menus are traditionally boring, right? Most of the time the navigation menu consists of some imagery with a corresponding mouseover image. Where's the originality? I've created a fancy navigation menu that highlights navigation items and creates a chain effect. The XHTML Just some simple...

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!