Clone a specific Git repository branch

David Y.

The Problem

How can I clone a branch on a repository? Is there a way to only download that branch?

The Solution

We can accomplish this by using git clone with the -b/--branch flag. For example, to clone the 1.x branch of sentry-cli:

git clone -b 1.x https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-cli

Once the repository is downloaded, we can check the branch by running these commands:

cd sentry-cli git status

We should receive the following output:

On branch 1.x Your branch is up to date with 'origin/1.x'. nothing to commit, working tree clean

In the background, git clone will fetch all the repository’s branches and then check out the one we’ve specified. If we only want to fetch one branch, we can add the flag --single-branch to our git clone command.

git clone -b 1.x https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-cli --single-branch

Loved by over 4 million developers and more than 90,000 organizations worldwide, Sentry provides code-level observability to many of the world’s best-known companies like Disney, Peloton, Cloudflare, Eventbrite, Slack, Supercell, and Rockstar Games. Each month we process billions of exceptions from the most popular products on the internet.

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