You can clone repositories without the whole history

I browsed electron boilerplates today and I discovered something interesting in the electron-react-boilerplate.

The getting started guide includes advises to use git clone --depth=1.

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/chentsulin/electron-react-boilerplate.git your-project-name

What's this depth argument? Let's find out!

$  git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/chentsulin/electron-react-boilerplate.git your-project-name
Cloning into 'your-project-name'...

$ cd your-project-name

$ git log

* 586b84f Amila Welihinda -  (grafted, HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) Misc code style changes to menu.js (5 weeks ago)
(END)

Look at the entries shown in the git log. Thanks to the --depth=1 argument the just cloned repository only includes a single commit. You might know that cloning an active project can take some moments because you're downloading the entire history.

But thanks to --depth getting the source code was super speedy!

git's documentation defines the depth argument as follows:

Use depth to define that you don't want to clone and include thousands of unrelated commits from the past when checking out a project.

Ideally, there would be a way to use git to clone projects without the .git directory. But I don't think you can do that with git, though. (if you know how to do it, please let me know)

But if you have a recent version of npm installed on your machine, I recently discovered an intuitive command to download GitHub projects without history and .git directory.

The command npm init using is easy to remember and downloads history-free projects. Read more about it in my discovery post.

# Download chentsulin/electron-react-boilerplate without
# history or .git directory
$ npm init using chentsulin/electron-react-boilerplate

npm init using uses the degit package under the hood. You can use that one, too, if you like.

# Download chentsulin/electron-react-boilerplate without
# history or .git directory
$ degit chentsulin/electron-react-boilerplate

Happy downloading!