Git sparse checkout with exclusion

Question

According to this thread, exclusion in Git's sparse-checkout feature is supposed to be implemented. Is it?

Assume that I have the following structure:

papers/
papers/...
presentations/
presentations/heavy_presentation
presentations/...

Now I want to exclude presentations/heavy_presentation from the checkout, while leaving the rest in the checkout. I haven't managed to get this running. What's the right syntax for this?

Answer 1

I would have expected something like the below to work:

/*
!presentations/heavy_presentation

But it doesn't. And I did try many other combinations. I think the exclude is not implemented properly and there are bugs around it (still)

Something like:

presentations/*
!presentations/heavy_presentation

does work though and you will get the presentations folder without the heavy_presentation folder.

So the workaround would be to include everything else explicitly.

Answer 2

Sadly none of the above worked for me so I spent very long time trying different combination of sparse-checkout file.

In my case I wanted to skip folders with IntelliJ IDEA configs.

Here is what I did:

---

Run git clone https://github.com/myaccount/myrepo.git --no-checkout

Run git config core.sparsecheckout true

Created .git\info\sparse-checkout with following content

!.idea/*
!.idea_modules/*
/*

Run 'git checkout --' to get all files.

---

Critical thing to make it work was to add /* after folder's name.

I have git 1.9

Answer 3

I had the same problem. I fixed it with something like:

!presentations/heavy_presentation
presentations/*

How I understand that it works: It reads the file rule by rule. If something is included, it includes all paths that contain that word, and it doesn't change its status anymore until the end of the sparse checkout. If you add exclude rule before include, in my opinion it will delete the files first and than mark all as included.

I am not completely sure, this is what I have supposed based on my experience and has been working for me. I hope it will help someone.