I have gitosis running on my server. My build system needs to get a copy of the code from gitosis. Right now I clone the whole repository, which takes a long time.
How do I get just the head of a branch? (I've tried git archive, but can't seem to get an archive from gitosis.)
Can I create an archive from a bare repository?
Pass the --depth=1 flag to git clone to only get the HEAD commit. This creates a "shallow clone". Note that there are limitations with a shallow clone: you can't get the full history (obviously), you cannot clone or pull from it, and you cannot push from it.
I just created a test bare repo and yes, you can create an archive from a bare repository.
$ cd /tmp/foo.git/
$ git archive --output=/tmp/foo.tgz HEAD
Depending on whether remote side enabled archive support, you can try:
git archive --remote=git://git.example.com/repo.git --output=repo.zip HEAD
But you have to be either able to access repository via SSH protocol, or support for this has to be explicitely enabled in git daemon, so it is rare.
gitosis does not yet support git-archive, AFAIS. The corresponding branch at http://eagain.net/gitweb/?p=gitosis.git;a=commitdiff;h=refs/heads/remote-archive has not been merged.
So you can't use "git archive --remote=git://git.example.com/repo.git ..." with gitosis yet.