Clone bare git

23 Oct 2009

Found an interesting option to clone a git repository. Honestly, speaking I have no idea how it could be usefult because it does not actually do a checkout of the HEAD. Anyways, if you run:

git clone --bare git://github.com/andhapp/decoct.git

then you will have the following directory structure which is quite similar to what’s in your project’s .git folder.

-- decoct.git 
   -- HEAD
   -- config
   -- description
   -- hooks
   -- info
   -- objects
   -- packed-refs
   -- refs

This is what the doc has to say:

--bare : Make a bare GIT repository. That is, instead of creating and placing the administrative files in /.git, make the itself the $GIT_DIR. This obviously implies the -n because there is nowhere to check out the working tree. Also the branch heads at the remote are copied directly to corresponding local branch heads, without mapping them to refs/remotes/origin/. When this option is used, neither remote-tracking branches nor the related configuration variables are created.

This is exacly what it does but how would this be useful puzzles me.