If a repository has an extremely long history or large size in the version control, contributing to it becomes a challenge. If you execute git clone
on it, Git will try to download the entire history. This can take up a considerable amount of disk space, network bandwidth and time. How can you handle this scenario?
Start with a shallow clone
Let’s assume that you’ve forked the repository you want to contribute to. Now, clone only a portion of the commit history that is required for you to work with. Let’s say you’re interested only in the last 3 commits from the HEAD. You can shallow clone the repository with the following command.
git clone --depth 3 https://github.com/fork/massive.git
A shallow clone, as per the docs fetches a history truncated to the specified number of commits. Also, note that the command mentioned above will only fetch the default branch. This happens because --single-branch
flag is implied automatically. To fetch the history near the tips of the other branches, --no-single-branch
flag should be specified while cloning.
In case you forget specifying --no-single-branch
flag, you can examine the fetch configuration.
$ git config --get remote.origin.fetch +refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master
and edit it to fetch the history from all the branches.
git config remote.origin.fetch "+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*"
Execute git remote update origin
and Git will fetch the history up to the requested depth.
Add the remote upstream
Add the remote upstream repository so that you can sync with the changes merged into it by other contributors.
git remote add upstream https://github.com/example/massive.git
Just like the fork, you can fetch the history of the upstream up to a certain depth from the HEAD.
git fetch --depth 2 upstream
Checkout a branch from the upstream
Create a new branch from the HEAD of an upstream branch.
git checkout -b latest upstream/dev
Make your changes, commit them and set the local latest
branch to track the remote of your fork.
git branch latest --set-upstream-to origin/latest
When you’ll push the changes, origin/latest
branch of the fork will be updated. You can then create a PR on the upstream repository for your changes to be merged.