Retrieve a single file from a repository

Question

In git version 1.7.9.5 this seems to work to export a single file from a remote

git archive --remote=ssh://host/pathto/repo.git HEAD README.md

This will cat the contents of the file README.md.

Following on from Jakub's answer. git archive produces a tar or zip archive, so you need to pipe the output through tar to get the file content:

git archive --remote=git://git.foo.com/project.git HEAD:path/to/directory filename | tar -x

Will save a copy of 'filename' from the HEAD of the remote repository in the current directory.

The :path/to/directory part is optional. If excluded, the fetched file will be saved to <current working dir>/path/to/directory/filename

In addition, if you want to enable use of git archive --remote on Git repositories hosted by git-daemon, you need to enable the daemon.uploadarch config option. See https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-daemon.html

If there is web interface deployed (like gitweb, cgit, Gitorious, ginatra), you can use it to download single file ('raw' or 'plain' view).

If other side enabled it, you can use git archive's '--remote=<URL>' option (and possibly limit it to a directory given file resides in), for example:

$ git archive [email protected]:foo/bar.git --prefix=path/to/ HEAD:path/to/ |  tar xvf -

Not in general but if you are using Github:

For me wget to the raw url turned out to be the best and easiest way to download one particular file.

Open the file in the browser and click on "Raw" button. Now refresh your browser, copy the url and do a wget or curl on it.

wget example:

wget 'https://github.abc.abc.com/raw/abc/folder1/master/folder2/myfile.py?token=DDDDnkl92Kw8829jhXXoxBaVJIYW-h7zks5Vy9I-wA%3D%3D' -O myfile.py

Curl example:

curl 'https://example.com/raw.txt' > savedFile.txt