Create a Repository Archive with git

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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!

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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.

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