Clone A Repo Just For The Files, Without History

Though the history of a Git repository is a huge part of its value, sometimes you just want a copy of the files for the current state of the main branch.

Using the --depth flag with git-clone allows you to clone a repo without its history. You can do that with a depth of 1 which will clone the top of the tree and exclude all the past history.

$ git clone --depth 1 [e-mail]:jbranchaud/til.git

If you do a git log after this, you'll see there is only one commit in the history. Depending on the size and history of the repo, you may notice that the clone is quicker than one that includes the full history.

See man git-clone for more details.