Is there a way to programmatically download a single file from a remote git repository, in Java?
I was able to do something similar with Subversion using SVNKit and I've seen there is a pure java implementation of git (eclipse's JGit) which might be able to do something similar, so I hope there is a positive answer; though from what I understand about how git works - allowing updates only from local repositories - this could prove to be problematic.
Short Answergit checkout origin/master -- path/to/file // git checkout <local repo name (default is origin)>/<branch name> -- path/to/file will checkout the particular file from the downloaded changes (origin/master).
You can't clone a single file using git. Git is a distributed version control system, the Idea behind its clone functionality is to have a complete copy of project and all versions of files related to that project.
You can fetch a specific branch from remote with git fetch <remote_name> <branch_name> only if the branch is already on the tracking branch list (you can check it with git branch -r ).
git isn't really designed for single file access from a remote repository but you can abuse git archive
for this. The downside is that you have to download a "tree" rather than just the blob that you need.
E.g.
git archive --remote=url://to.git.repo branch path/to/dir | tar -x file
As an alternative, if you have gitweb set up on the remote repository you can use a simple curl or wget command to download any file in its "raw" format.
What sort of access to do you have to the remote repository? Is it via SSH, can you call commands? If so, you can just invoke git show HEAD:$path_to_file
.
If you cannot invoke commands on that machine, it is still entirely possible to do this, but you'll have to understand the Git repository format. (That’s much less scary than it sounds, since it is very simple by design. Unlike eg. Subversion, the repository format is not intended as a black box.)
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