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This article will teach you how to clone a subdirectory of a Git repository.

Git is a version control system that maintains a history of changes made to a project directory. In a typical project development environment, people separate different project modules into different subdirectories.

Then only specific project module subdirectories can be checked out or cloned. To do this, we can use sparse-checkoutthe functionality provided by Git.

We will now illustrate this with an example.

Clone or checkout a subdirectory in a Git repository

Git is used in collaborative development environments to track changes made to files in a project directory. One approach is to keep different project modules in different subdirectories within the main project directory of the project development environment.

The Git repository will track this main project directory, so the entire project directory can be cloned or checked out. Often, different teams will work on different project modules within a large project.

So, in this case, there is no need to check in the entire project directory. It is enough to clone only the project module subdirectory that a specific team is working on.

Cloning only a specific subdirectory (i.e. a subset of) a project Git repository is called a sparse checkout. We can do this by sparse checkoutchecking out only the subdirectory we want from the project directory in the Git repository.

Assume we have a my_projectproject directory called . In the project directory my_project, there are subdirectories for different modules, named frontend, backend, and documentationso on.

We only want to checkout or clone frontendthe modules subdirectory. Therefore, we will now first create a directory for the repository as shown below.

$ mkdir my_project
$ cd my_project

After creating the project directory, we will now initialize the Git repository and add the remote url as shown below.

$ git init
$ git remote add -f origin https://github.com/johndoe/my_project.git

We have to enable to sparse checkoutscheckout or clone only subdirectories of the main project directory.

We can git configachieve the same using the command. We need to use git configthe command as shown below.

$ git config core.sparsecheckout true

We can now tell Git which subdirectories we want to check out.

frontendTherefore, to enable checkout of only the subdirectory, we need to .git/info/sparse-checkoutlist it in the file.

$ echo "frontend/" >> .git/info/sparse-checkout

Now, we can get the files from the remote Git repository.

$ git pull origin master

my_projectNow, we only have the main project 's subdirectory in our working tree frontend.

So, we learned how to clone or checkout only a specific subdirectory of a Git repository in Git.