Git: How to ignore/specify files for *checkout*

So I wanted to ship my code without the test files to the production server.

Easiest way for me was just to remove all the test files with: rsync --exclude 'tests' after unpacking the archive.


Git's Sparse-Checkout

If you only want to checkout a portion of your repository, you can use git's sparse-checkout option which has powerful include/exclude rules.

The following StackOverflow question has some helpful instructions:
GIT checkout except one folder

But as a summary:

  1. Enable the sparseCheckout option:

    git config core.sparseCheckout true

  2. Create the file called .git/info/sparse-checkout containing:

    /*
!node_modules

    which effectively means include everything except the node_modules directory when checking out a repository into the working directory.


If you want to package up files for deployment, you probably don't need - or want - the repo itself. This is exactly what git archive is for. A couple examples from the manpage (linked):

git archive --format=tar --prefix=junk/ HEAD | (cd /var/tmp/ && tar xf -)

Create a tar archive that contains the contents of the latest commit on the current branch, and extract it in the /var/tmp/junk directory.

git archive --format=tar --prefix=git-1.4.0/ v1.4.0 | gzip > git-1.4.0.tar.gz

Create a compressed tarball for v1.4.0 release.

You ought to be able to get it to do exactly what you want, with the help of the export-ignore attribute:

export-ignore

Files and directories with the attribute export-ignore won’t be added to archive files. See gitattributes(5) for details.

For example, to exclude the directory private and the files mine.txt and secret.c, you could put in the file .gitattributes:

private/     export-ignore
secret.c     export-ignore

Just like gitignore files, you can put those anywhere in your repository, and they'll operate from that directory, but starting from the top level is a good bet.

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