Python way to clone a git repository

My solution is very simple and straight forward. It doesn't even need the manual entry of passphrase/password.

Here is my complete code:

import sys
import os

path  = "/path/to/store/your/cloned/project" 
clone = "git clone gitolite@<server_ip>:/your/project/name.git" 

os.system("sshpass -p your_password ssh user_name@your_localhost")
os.chdir(path) # Specifying the path where the cloned project needs to be copied
os.system(clone) # Cloning

Using GitPython will give you a good python interface to Git.

For example, after installing it (pip install gitpython), for cloning a new repository you can use clone_from function:

from git import Repo

Repo.clone_from(git_url, repo_dir)

See the GitPython Tutorial for examples on using the Repo object.

Note: GitPython requires git being installed on the system, and accessible via system's PATH.

Github's libgit2 binding, pygit2 provides a one-liner cloning a remote directory:

clone_repository(url, path, 
    bare=False, repository=None, remote=None, checkout_branch=None, callbacks=None)

There is GitPython. Haven’t heard of it before and internally, it relies on having the git executables somewhere; additionally, they might have plenty of bugs. But it could be worth a try.

How to clone:

import git
git.Git("/your/directory/to/clone").clone("git://gitorious.org/git-python/mainline.git")

(It’s not nice and I don’t know if it is the supported way to do it, but it worked.)