Standard way to send git repo to a non-technical person

Question

I work for non-technical clients, who need to get a copy of the work I do at the end of the contract, so that they can have the option of handing it on to a different developer.

The problem is that they are non-technical, so I don't think I can expect them to download a Git GUI and clone the repo to their machines. In fact, I don't even have the repo on a remote other than the host at the moment.

I think I have three options

1. put the repository on BitBucket / Github / similar and give the client access to it
2. archive the whole repository including .git folders and give that to the client
3. archive the whole repo contents, but without any .git stuff and give that to the client (to save on size)

The repositories aren't huge, so size isn't an issue. But right now, I'm leaning towards sending the archive including the .git folders, to avoid having an online repository (seems like future admin burden for it will come to me). Is there a standard way of dealing with this?

Answer 1

A single branch can be packaged using:

git bundle create <filename> <branch>

The whole repository can be packaged as follows:

git bundle create <filename> --all

You can then use the bundle by path as if it were a read only repository.

git clone <filename> <newreponame>

Answer 2

If you just want to send updates infrequently, then archives might indeed be the easiest solution. git even provides help with archiving the current head.

git archive HEAD --format=zip > archive.zip

If you decide to go the route with online repository services, github has a "Download Zip" option at the bottom of the sidebar on the left, so that would also allow easy access by non-technical clients.