How to Export a Git Project

In this article, we will discuss exporting a project in Git. We employ the git archive command to create an archive file of our Git repositories.

Such a file will combine several files into one. Archive files make it easy to share among developers or for long-term storage.

the git archive Command

What does it do?

We use the git archive command to generate archive files for specified refs like commits, branches, and trees. The command can be used along with other arguments to alter the output, as shown below.

Git Export Examples

Let us start with a basic git archive command.

$ git archive --format=tar HEAD

If we execute this command on our terminal, it will create an archive file from the HEAD in our repository. The archive will go to our temporary stdout stream.

We can specify a permanent file as shown below.

$ git archive --output=./sample_repo_archive.tar --format=tar HEAD

When executing the command above, it will create an archive file for our HEAD ref and store it in a sample_repo_archive.tar file. The --format=tar option instructs Git to make an uncompressed archive output.

We can pass other popular formats like zip and tar.gz to our format option. If we do not include a format option, Git does to the specified --output option.

$ git archive --output=./sample_repo_archive.tar.gz --format=tar HEAD ./Updates

Git also makes it possible to archive parts of our repository. The command above will create an archive file for the files in the /.Updates directory in our repository.

Git Archive Usage Options

The examples above give us a basic idea of the most frequently used git archive options. Let us explore another option we can pass to the command to further alter the output.

--prefix=<prefix>/

We use the prefix argument to attach a path to all the files in our archive for easier extraction down the line.

--remote=<repo>

This is the go-to command in a scenario where we want to create an archive of our remote repository. When running the command, we must include our remote repository’s URL.

The command also allows us to point to ref in our remote repo.

Command Configuration

The git archive command respects the following configuration options.

$ git config --global tar.umask

We use the unmask configuration to specify Unix-level permission bit restriction on our archive file.

tar.<format>.command

We use the option above to create a custom shell command that will run our git archive output. It is the same as piping the stdout stream to a custom tool and omitting the --output option.

The basic concept of this operation is creating a fixed tailored archive post-processing tool.

tar.<format>.remote

We can enable the option above to allow remote developers to fetch archives in the specified format.

In a nutshell, we use the git archive command to generate distributable packages of our Git repositories. We can target a specific tree, branch or commit using this command.

It also has several output formats for added compression.