git download-subpath

My blog has ~250MB of photos in it (as I archived my Instagram here — a decade of photos) which means that every time I want some files from my blog's repo I've needed to pull down all that data to get at the few files I want.

This isn't a problem on my laptop where I work on my blog (as it's already cloned), but I also keep my IndieKit config in there, which I need to copy to the server it runs from. I don't want to have to download hundreds of MB (and growing!) of photo data every time I want to update it.

So I built git-download-subpath, which is a bash script around git's partial clone functionality.

This script (which you can find & download below) completes these steps:

1. Clones a "no tree" copy of the repo to a temporary directory (just references to commits & the latest files, not the data itself)
2. Completes a "no cone" sparse checkout of the subpath desired
3. Moves that desired subpath over the working directory (or the destination, if specified)

I'm no bash expert, so there may be subtle bugs here; let me know if you spot them!

Copy the following bash to git-download-subpath somewhere in your $PATH (I keep it in /usr/local/bin), and mark as executable with chmod +x git-download-subpath: