GIT: HOW TO PULL JUST A DIRECTORY WITH NO 'GIT' STUFF IN IT

Overview

If you are working in a web-tree and you want to pull your website out of git, but you don't want all the "git" detail, the easiest way is to pull just a directory from the remote git repository and then replace your webtree with it as follows:

In your $HOME directory, **NOT** in your webtree, pull the webserver public root directory as follows (this is from a web-tree already commited to the repository):

ssh <user>@cvs.company.com "cd /<git project directory> && git archive --format=tar main public" | tar -x -

This says:

1. ssh to remote repository as you
2. switch into the repository directory where your git project is stored
3. get all of the files out of the public directory and return them in a tar stream
4. then outside of the ssh session it pipes them back to tar to be written locally into the $CWD (current working directory)
   1. NODE... if you are fetching a directory and not a file, it will fetch the directory name and put the files under it
   2. for example "public" will make the subdirectory "public" and put the subsequent files under it.

It doesn't copy any of the git data, or do a checkout, etc.  it only copies the files into your directory.