I'm a bit puzzled why I'm unable to checkout a tag directly from the git clone command. What I try to do is:
git clone -b mytag <url>/foo.git
The error I get is:
warning: Remote branch mytag not found in upstream origin, using HEAD instead
Tag is present and e.g.
cd foo && git checkout mytag
...works well.
If anyone could share some light on why it's impossible to clone directly into a tag I would appreciate it. Thank you.
Are you in a detached head after the git checkout mytag?
It is possible that mytag is not in the "refs/heads/" namespace (for branche HEADs) of foo.git, but still reference a valid commit.
That would explain the warning in git clone, while the git checkout runs ok.
-b is meant to checkout a branch not a tag. That's why it's saying remote BRANCH not found ;-)
Cloning directly into a tag, beats me intention-wise.
But the command you are using, actually is used to clone repository's branch. So you are actually asking to checkout branch name mytag from repository. mytag branch is obviously not in your remote repository.
And I don't think there is any direct way to clone into a new tag. You have to clone and then apply tags or fetch the tags of remote repository explicitly using git fetch --tags $URL.
Edit on response:
Well, deployment from tag is a common usage style. As code is usually tagged once its at a considerable state. You can checkout mytag once you cloned and fetched tags from remote repositories.
git checkout mytag
or even
git checkout -b mytagbranch mytag
and continue the deployment.
Perhaps all you really need/want to do is use git archive to pull a tarball of anything git rev-parse can understand. You can use the --remote option to pull the archive from some remote source identically to the <url>/foo.git value that you are passing to clone. In theory, this will be much quicker since all you will be grabbing is the working tree and not the entire repository.
Here's a "works for me" example:
% git archive --prefix foo/ --remote <url>/foo.git my-tag | tar -xf -