Git Clone: Just the files, please?

Question

The git command that would be the closest from what you are looking for would by git archive.
See backing up project which uses git: it will include in an archive all files (including submodules if you are using the git-archive-all script)

You can then use that archive anywhere, giving you back only files, no .git directory.

git archive --remote=<repository URL> | tar -t

If you need folders and files just from the first level:

git archive --remote=<repository URL> | tar -t --exclude="*/*"

To list only first-level folders of a remote repo:

git archive --remote=<repository URL> | tar -t --exclude="*/*" | grep "/"

Note: that does not work for GitHub (not supported)

So you would need to clone (shallow to quicken the clone step), and then archive locally:

git clone --depth=1 [email protected]:xxx/yyy.git
cd yyy
git archive --format=tar aTag -o aTag.tar

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Another option would be to do a shallow clone (as mentioned below), but locating the .git folder elsewhere.

git --git-dir=/path/to/another/folder.git clone --depth=1 /url/to/repo

The repo folder would include only the file, without .git.

Note: git --git-dir is an option of the command git, not git clone.

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Update with Git 2.14.X/2.15 (Q4 2017): it will make sure to avoid adding empty folders.

"git archive", especially when used with pathspec, stored an empty directory in its output, even though Git itself never does so.
This has been fixed.

See commit 4318094 (12 Sep 2017) by René Scharfe (``).
Suggested-by: Jeff King (peff).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 62b1cb7, 25 Sep 2017)}

archive: don't add empty directories to archives

While git doesn't track empty directories, git archive can be tricked into putting some into archives.
While that is supported by the object database, it can't be represented in the index and thus it's unlikely to occur in the wild.

As empty directories are not supported by git, they should also not be written into archives.
If an empty directory is really needed then it can be tracked and archived by placing an empty .gitignore file in it.

git archive --format=tar --remote=<repository URL> HEAD | tar xf -

taken from here

you can create a shallow clone to only get the last few revisions:

 git clone --depth 1 git://url

then either simply delete the .git directory or use git archive to export your tree.

Why not perform a clone and then delete the .git directory so that you just have a bare working copy?

Edit: Or in fact why use clone at all? It's a bit confusing when you say that you want a git repo but without a .git directory. If you mean that you just want a copy of some state of the tree then why not do cp -R in the shell instead of the git clone and then delete the .git afterwards.