Cloning a Git repo without the .git directory

Question

Is it possible to clone a repository without git creating a .git folder inside the local copy of the repository? Sort of like a read only functionality?

Answer 1

You’re looking for git archive. You either use it within a repository, or pass it the --remote=<URL> switch, and it gives you a tarball or zip file of the source tree. You can pipe that straight back into tar if you want to just get a pristine copy of the tree.