Cloning subtree/subdirectory of git repo

Question

I have a git repo on Github, looks like so:

.git/
assets/
  tools/
    a.sh
    b.sh
    c.sh

of course the .git folder is not in version control, but you get the idea. And I want to copy the tools/*.sh to a local directory, at this path:

./scripts/git/tools

My current directory is a git repo that shares a totally different history than the remote git repo, I just want to copy some files from the remote, I don't want to merge anything.

I figure I could do something like this:

git clone --path assets/tools/*.sh "$remote_repo"  ./scripts/git/tools

but that command is not real, is there some command I can use to do this?

the only other way I can think of doing it, is cloning the whole repo to some temp directory and then copying the files over, but that's not as much fun.

Answer 1

For Github repos, you can clone any sub-directories of any repo using the tool github-clone

Install it like this:

pip install github-clone

Then use it like this:

ghclone https://github.com/HR/Crypter/tree/dev/app