How to Export a Git Project?

Last Updated : 22 Feb, 2022

Git is a free and open-source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git relies on the basis of distributed development of software where more than one developer may have access to the source code of a specific application and can modify changes to it that may be seen by other developers.

Exporting a Git Project

We are going to learn about git export but before we continue let’s understand what actually gIt export means. Git export performs a git clone and clones it in a different location but without the .git file, i.e., it won't be git repo anymore, but you would have all its files.

There is no such command as git export in Git bash, but we can perform it using a different command known as git archive.

Source Code:

git archive [--format=<fmt>] [--list] [--prefix=<prefix>/] [<extra>]
          [-o <file> | --output=<file>] [--worktree-attributes]
          [--remote=<repo> [--exec=<git-upload-archive>]] <tree-ish>
          [<path>…]

Example:

git archive master | tar -x -C /somewhere/else

By default, the output is produced in "tar" format through the git archive command, so it would be better to store it in a zipped file like "gzip" or "b2zip" format.

git archive master | bzip2 >source-tree.tar.bz2

Here, we have renamed our file as source-tree.tar and used it in "b2zip" format.

We can also use a .zip format using the following command:

git archive --format zip --output /full/path/to/zipfile.zip master

We can clone the entire git repository using this command but we must be careful as even though it doesn’t include the .git directory, however, it will contain other get hidden files like .gitignore .gitattributes, etc. There are separate commands if you wish to remove them on the go. Commit a .gitattributes file with the following code as shown below as follows:

/test export-ignore  
.gitattributes export-ignore  
.gitignore export-ignore

If we are interested in exporting the index the command for exporting it is

git checkout-index -a -f --prefix=/destination/path/

Exporting a Repository

Step 1: Go to your git bash. and then to the repo you want to extract or export.

Here, we are going to export this repo named 'Ada August-a Challenge' and it's main branch.

Step 2: Now export it to your preferred format and location, here we will export it to the same location in .bz2' format.

Here, you can see that we have Ada-August-a-Challenge.tar.bz2 additional file. This is the archive of the repo we wanted to export. Let's unzip it to find what files are hereby copied.

Step 3: Unzip it, to find out the inner materials.

Here on unzipping bz2 format, we found a tar file with the same, and on unzipping it we found all the required files. We can here find that the files which were not committed are not included in our archive.