How to clone a specific Git tag

Question

From git-clone(1) Manual Page

--branch can also take tags and detaches the HEAD at that commit in the resulting repository.

I tried

git clone --branch <tag_name> <repo_url> 

But it does not work. It returns:

warning: Remote branch 2.13.0 not found in upstream origin, using HEAD instead 

How to use this parameter?

Answer 1

git clone --depth 1 --branch <tag_name> <repo_url> 

--depth 1 is optional but if you only need the state at that one revision, you probably want to skip downloading all the history up to that revision.

Answer 2

Use --single-branch option to only clone history leading to tip of the tag. This saves a lot of unnecessary code from being cloned.

git clone <repo_url> --branch <tag_name> --single-branch