Is it possible to add a file to a git repo without having it checked out locally?

Question

Goal: Add a new file to a remote git repository without checking the whole thing out locally.

Why: I'm building an app that will add files to a user's git repository. Some of these repositories will be hundreds of megs. Some will be touched very infrequently. I want to avoid taking up terabytes of disk space to keep large repos checked out that won't be touched often, and I don't want to incur the inevitable delay of checking out a 200Mb repo (lots of binary files) in order to add a new one new file to it and push that file back to the origin.

I'm assuming the default git client can NOT do this, but am hoping that someone has written something that can commit to a remote repo (don't care what language) without having the whole thing checked out locally. Does the Cloud9 IDE do something like this?

The app would have full access to the users git repo, either via SSH or whatever mechanism GitHub uses for oAuthed apps to tweak repos.

Answer 1

Depending on the structure of your repository, you may be able to use sparse checkouts to avoid downloading the large files:

http://schacon.github.com/git/git-read-tree.html#_sparse_checkout

(More information at Checkout subdirectories in Git?)

Answer 2

Git has several options for shallow cloning and filepath specific, partial cloning but these are not pushable.

The trick here is to utilize the --lightweight flag when you checkout - in which case, you will be able to push to a limited repository.

However, these solutions appear severely nonideal... Seems more intuitive that , If the app has programmatic access to a git repository, then you should be able to create, or require on installation the creation of a git project that is specific to your application's needs, which is empty.