Tech Tip: Mitigating “git clone”’s inability to be resumed using rsync
Happy new civil year, everyone. As you may know Git is a distributed version control system, but its often time-consuming (if the repository’s history is large) “git clone” operation cannot be resumed, which is a problem with bad Internet connections. There was a service that did “git clone” and then allowed people to download using HTTPS Called “Git bundler” but it has been down for sometime now. However, I found a different solution to the problem.
What can be done is use
ssh
to log in to a remote host, where the “git clone” is performed (preferably,
but not absolutely necessarily, when running on top of a session of
tmux,
GNU Screen or
similar). After that, you can use
rsync over ssh to download
the .git directory to the local workstation (I like to use
the invocation rsync -a --progress -v --inplace for that).
Following that all you have to do is run git clone to a different directory
to the one where you put the .git and set “git remote” appropriately.
Hope that helps, and the same can be done with other distributed version control systems such as Mercurial, or Bzr.