Git sparse checkout with exclusion

Question

According to this thread, exclusion in Git's sparse-checkout feature is supposed to be implemented. Is it?

Assume that I have the following structure:

papers/
papers/...
presentations/
presentations/heavy_presentation
presentations/...

Now I want to exclude presentations/heavy_presentation from the checkout, while leaving the rest in the checkout. I haven't managed to get this running. What's the right syntax for this?

Answer 1

Sadly none of the above worked for me so I spent very long time trying different combination of sparse-checkout file.

In my case I wanted to skip folders with IntelliJ IDEA configs.

Here is what I did:

---

Run git clone https://github.com/myaccount/myrepo.git --no-checkout

Run git config core.sparsecheckout true

Created .git\info\sparse-checkout with following content

!.idea/*
!.idea_modules/*
/*

Run 'git checkout --' to get all files.

---

Critical thing to make it work was to add /* after folder's name.

I have git 1.9

Answer 2

I would have expected something like the below to work:

/*
!presentations/heavy_presentation

But it doesn't. And I did try many other combinations. I think the exclude is not implemented properly and there are bugs around it (still)

Something like:

presentations/*
!presentations/heavy_presentation

does work though and you will get the presentations folder without the heavy_presentation folder.

So the workaround would be to include everything else explicitly.