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
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

  • By
    Being a Dev Dad

    I get asked loads of questions every day but I'm always surprised that they're rarely questions about code or even tech -- many of the questions I get are more about non-dev stuff like what my office is like, what software I use, and oftentimes...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools, Mario, and Portal

    I'm a big fan of video games. I don't get much time to play them but I'll put down the MacBook Pro long enough to get a few games in. One of my favorites is Portal. For those who don't know, what's...

  • By
    Add Controls to the PHP Calendar

    I showed you how to create a PHP calendar last week. The post was very popular so I wanted to follow it up with another post about how you can add controls to the calendar. After all, you don't want your...

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!