Using the heroku repo plugin to get a copy of my repo, how do I get a copy of my app?

Question

I'm using the heroku repo plugin to get a copy of my entire repo from heroku. At times, for very specific client errors, I like to get a copy of my app and a fresh copy of the app DB to debug.

The tarball I get contains a bunch of different files associated with my heroku repo ... but the actual application code is packed into the objects/pack/... file (there is a .idx file and a .pack file).

I'm trying to figure out the easiest way for me to get a copy of the code associated with this repo and not having much luck.

Any thoughts on the best way to do this? I tried to do a git clone to get a copy of the code on Heroku, but apparently because my repo is too big heroku might stall (it has consistently been stalling at ~58%. the folks at Heroku have been super helpful and pointed out this plugin ... but I'm not sure how to get my code through this method).

Thanks!

Answer 1

It's impossible to be sure without knowing what other files you have, but it sounds like the tarball you've got might just be the .git directory of your application. Try using git clone to clone from the root of the unpacked tarball—you can clone from a local repository just as easily as from a remote one.

If you've extracted the tarball into some_dir, then you'll want to:

1. Create a new directory somewhere (your app will go here); I'll call it my_app.
2. cd into my_app.
3. Run git clone some_dir . to clone the extracted tarball (which is effectively a bare repository) as a new repo with a working tree in my_app.