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This article explains how we can extract a specific folder from a remote Git repository. This approach comes in handy when we want to work on certain files in a large repository.

Downloading a single folder from a 2GB repository can save a lot of time. Without further ado, let's jump right in.

Pull a specific folder in Git

The simplest method we can use to extract a specific folder involves using Git Sparse Checkoutthe .exe function. We could explain the concept, but an example will work for this situation.

In the example below, we have a remote repository hosted on GitHub that contains a number of files arranged in directories. We want to pull and work on the application folder.

We will follow the steps below to pull the application folder.

On Git Bash, we will create a directory to store our application folder.

$ mkdir Djangp-datta-able

Use the cd command to navigate to your directory and initialize the Git repository.

$ git init

This is the current content of our local repository.

$ ls -la
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 1 pc pc 0 Aug 31 09:45 ./
drwxr-xr-x 1 pc pc 0 Aug 31 09:44 ../
drwxr-xr-x 1 pc pc 0 Aug 31 09:45 .git/

Next, we will add the remote repository that we want to pull from to our local repository. We will run:

$ git remote add origin https://github.com/app-generator/django-datta-able.git

Once that is done, we can go ahead and enable the sparse checkout property in our repo. We will use git configthe command as shown below.

$ git config core.sparsecheckout true

We can then add the application folder to the sparse checkout properties as shown below.

$ echo 'apps' >> .git/info/sparse-checkout

You can replace app with the directory you want to extract from. You can also add multiple directories to the sparse checkout feature.

All that's left is to pull from the remote repository. We will run:

$ git pull origin master

The above command will take the application folder and clone it to our local directory. Let’s check the contents of our local repository.

$ ls -la
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 1 pc pc 0 Aug 31 09:49 ./
drwxr-xr-x 1 pc pc 0 Aug 31 09:44 ../
drwxr-xr-x 1 pc pc 0 Aug 31 09:50 .git/
drwxr-xr-x 1 pc pc 0 Aug 31 09:49 apps/

You can see that our local repository now has an apps/ folder. When inspecting our directory we find:

There you have it. We have successfully pulled a folder from the remote repository.

We can now modify the code, commit and push it back to the remote repository.

Before we wrap up, there is another approach we can use, which we will discuss shortly. However, the approach we are about to discuss will not allow us to modify the code and push it back to the remote.

After adding the remote repository to your local repository, run git fetchthe command and view the folder of interest as shown below.

$ git checkout HEAD path/to/your/dir/or/file

We got the above method from Stack Overflow, which only shows that it can pull a specific folder from a remote repository. If you want to modify, commit, and push back to the remote, use the sparse checkout feature.