Tool: degit

I just came across a great tool to “shallow copy” a git repository.

I often clone git repositories as a starting point for my projects, or for learning purposes.

But I don’t need the fully-fledged git history that comes with it.

To do that, I use git clone.

But there’s a better way:

degit makes copies of git repositories. When you run degit some-user/some-repo, it will find the latest commit on [the repository] and download the associated tar file to ~/.degit/some-user/some-repo/commithash.tar.gz if it doesn’t already exist locally. (This is much quicker than using git clone, because you’re not downloading the entire git history.)

degit is a straightforward tool that’s easy to use.

Tool: degit

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