Exporting Git

If you want to create a release of your code, or provide some poor non-git user with a snapshot of just a specific tree, you can use the git-archive command.

NOTE
'git-archive' used to be called 'git-tar-tree', in case you ever see that command around in older articles

You can create the archive in either 'tar' or 'zip' formats, the default being 'tar'. You can use the '---prefix' argument to determine what directory, if any, the files are expanded into. To create a gzipped tarball, you'll have to pipe the output through 'gzip' first.

git-archive --prefix=simplegit/ v0.1 | gzip > simple-git-0.1.tgz

Then, if you email that tarball to someone, they would get this when they opened it:

$ tar zxpvf simple-git-0.1.tgz
simplegit/README
simplegit/Rakefile
simplegit/TODO
simplegit/lib/
simplegit/lib/simplegit.rb

You can also archive parts of your project. This command will create a zip file of just the 'lib' directory of the first parent of your master branch that will expand out into the current directory:

git-archive --format=zip master^ lib/ > simple-git-lib.zip

Which will unzip like this:

$ unzip simple-git-lib.zip
Archive:  simple-git-lib.zip
ce9b0d5551762048735dd67917046b44176317e0
   creating: lib/
  inflating: lib/simplegit.rb

git archive