Git shortcut to pull with clone if no local there yet?

Question

Is there a one-command way to get an up-to-date mirror of a remote repo? That is

• if local repo not there yet: clone
• if it's there: pull

I know I could script this around (e.g if [ -d repo ]; then (cd repo && git pull); else git clone $repourl;fi ) , but I need the simplest possible cross-platform way (actually used for Jenkins-CI, which I know does this by default, however I need 2 repos for which support is limited).

Git has similar shortcuts for other things (eg. checkout -b, and pull itself), so I'm wondering if I missed something. Thanks!

Answer 1

There is not, given that the commands which operate on existing repos all assume that they're being run inside a given repo.

That said, if you're running in a shell, you could simply make use of the shell built-ins. For instance, here's bash:

if cd repo; then git pull; else git clone https://server/repo repo; fi 

This checks to see if repo is a valid directory, and if so, does a pull within it; otherwise it does a clone to create the directory.

Answer 2

The cleanest one-liner might be

git -C repo pull || git clone https://server/repo repo