Quickly clone a git repository without the history

We were recently building a docker image which needed to include some code we have stored in a Git repository. To ensure the code was the most up-to-date, we include a git clone during the build process.

To avoid bundling a huge .git folder within our Docker image, you can specify a --depth when cloning. This clones the specified number of commits in the history. This example has just 1 commit in the log.

git clone --depth 1 [email protected]:path/to/repo.git

You can specify a branch, or a tag, to clone from too. In our build, we pass in a version via a Docker argument.

ARG CODE_VERSION

git clone -b $CODE_VERSION --depth 1 [email protected]:path/to/repo.git /path/to/folder

When building the Docker image, we then pass in the argument:

docker build --build-arg CODE_VERSION="1.2.1"

As an anecdote, I ran the above commands with the React library.

• git clone is 217 MB (and took about 2 minutes)
• git clone --depth 1 is 32.8 MB (and took about 7 seconds)

You can see that if you only cared about getting the code and not the full history, the --depth attribute could save you time and space.