Python way to clone a git repository

Question

Using GitPython will give you a good python interface to Git.

For example, after installing it (pip install gitpython), for cloning a new repository you can use clone_from function:

from git import Repo

Repo.clone_from(git_url, repo_dir)

See the GitPython Tutorial for examples on using the Repo object.

Note: GitPython requires git being installed on the system, and accessible via system's PATH.

There is GitPython. Haven’t heard of it before and internally, it relies on having the git executables somewhere; additionally, they might have plenty of bugs. But it could be worth a try.

How to clone:

import git
git.Git("/your/directory/to/clone").clone("git://gitorious.org/git-python/mainline.git")

(It’s not nice and I don’t know if it is the supported way to do it, but it worked.)

My solution is very simple and straight forward. It doesn't even need the manual entry of passphrase/password.

Here is my complete code:

import sys
import os

path  = "/path/to/store/your/cloned/project" 
clone = "git clone gitolite@<server_ip>:/your/project/name.git" 

os.system("sshpass -p your_password ssh user_name@your_localhost")
os.chdir(path) # Specifying the path where the cloned project needs to be copied
os.system(clone) # Cloning

Github's libgit2 binding, pygit2 provides a one-liner cloning a remote directory:

clone_repository(url, path, 
    bare=False, repository=None, remote=None, checkout_branch=None, callbacks=None)