Tarballing without Git metadata

Question

My source tree contains several directories which are using Git source control, and I need to tarball the whole tree excluding any references to the Git metadata or custom log files.

I thought I'd have a go using a combination of find/egrep/xargs/tar, but somehow the tar file contains the .git directories and the *.log files.

This is what I have:

find -type f . | egrep -v '\.git|\.log' | xargs tar rvf ~/app.tar

Can someone explain my misunderstanding here? Why is tar processing the files that find and egrep are filtering?

I'm open to other techniques as well.

Answer 1

You will get a nasty surprise when the number of files increase to more than one xargs command: Then you will first make a tar file of the first files and then overwrite the same tar file with the rest of the files.

GNU tar has the --exclude option which will solve this issue:

tar cvf ~/app.tar --exclude .git --exclude "*.log" .

Answer 2

You can try directly with the tar option --exclude-vcs:

--exclude-vcs:
          Exclude version control system directories

For example:

tar cvfj nameoffile.tar.bz2 directory/ --exclude-vcs

It works with Git.

Answer 3

Try something like this:

git archive --format=tar -o ~/tarball.tar -v HEAD

Add your .log files and everything else you don't want to be packed to your .gitignore file.