Fossil-SCM Pulling only a specific file

Question

I was trying to pull only a specific file from the fossil scm but the only reply I got was

 Fossil internal error: repository does not exist or is in an unreadable directory: blahblah

the commands I tried to use was

 fossil pull "file" -R "http://user@ip/folder/to/fossil"
 fossil pull "" -R "http://user@ip/folder/to/fossil/file"

I don't understand the documentation. If I wanted to just download a specific file without opening and cloning the repo, how would I do that?

Answer 1

You can't pull a single file from a fossil server. Pulling retrieves ALL the (new) changes in the remote repository into your local repository. It's the read part of the sync command, and it requires you to have cloned the repository first. (The -R command-line option always indicates a local repository).

But it seems to me that what you want, is simply to download a specific file from the remote repository. To do that, just use your browser to navigate the fossil server's web site (I'm using Fossil's own source code repository as an example):

http://fossil-scm.org/fossil/dir?ci=trunk

http://fossil-scm.org/fossil/tree?ci=trunk

and click on the file you want. On the page displaying the file, there's a Download button which will let you download that version of that specific file.

If the file is not text or HTML, you can just download the file using http, using a so-called documentation URL:

http://<server>/doc/<version>/<path-to-file>

For example, let's say you want to download the trunk version of the file www/concept1.gif from the main Fossil repository. That can be achieved by downloading the following URL:

  http://fossil-scm.org/fossil/doc/trunk/www/concept1.gif

That URL is composed as follows:

• http://fossil-scm.org/fossil is the repository's location;
• /doc/ indicates that you want to access the repository's files directly;
• trunk indicates the check-in you want to access. This can also be a check-in identifier (like e319e8e870) or a tag (like pending-review). If you specify a tag or branch name, you'll get the file associated with the last check-in with that tag, respectively in that branch;
• /www/concept1.gif is the path within the repository to the file you want to access.

Note that if the file you requested is a wiki, text, or HTML page, fossil will add its header and footer to it.