git-sparse-checkout(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | COMMANDS | EXAMPLES | INTERNALS — SPARSE CHECKOUT | INTERNALS — NON-CONE PROBLEMS | INTERNALS — CONE MODE HANDLING | INTERNALS — FULL PATTERN SET | INTERNALS — CONE PATTERN SET | INTERNALS — SUBMODULES | SEE ALSO | GIT | COLOPHON

GIT-SPARSE-CHECKOUT(1)         Git Manual         GIT-SPARSE-CHECKOUT(1)

NAME         top

       git-sparse-checkout - Reduce your working tree to a subset of
       tracked files

SYNOPSIS         top

       git sparse-checkout (init | list | set | add | reapply | disable | check-rules) [<options>]

DESCRIPTION         top

       This command is used to create sparse checkouts, which change the
       working tree from having all tracked files present to only having
       a subset of those files. It can also switch which subset of files
       are present, or undo and go back to having all tracked files
       present in the working copy.

       The subset of files is chosen by providing a list of directories
       in cone mode (the default), or by providing a list of patterns in
       non-cone mode.

       When in a sparse-checkout, other Git commands behave a bit
       differently. For example, switching branches will not update
       paths outside the sparse-checkout directories/patterns, and git
       commit -a will not record paths outside the sparse-checkout
       directories/patterns as deleted.

       THIS COMMAND IS EXPERIMENTAL. ITS BEHAVIOR, AND THE BEHAVIOR OF
       OTHER COMMANDS IN THE PRESENCE OF SPARSE-CHECKOUTS, WILL LIKELY
       CHANGE IN THE FUTURE.

COMMANDS         top

       list
           Describe the directories or patterns in the sparse-checkout
           file.

       set
           Enable the necessary sparse-checkout config settings
           (core.sparseCheckout, core.sparseCheckoutCone, and
           index.sparse) if they are not already set to the desired
           values, populate the sparse-checkout file from the list of
           arguments following the set subcommand, and update the
           working directory to match.

           To ensure that adjusting the sparse-checkout settings within
           a worktree does not alter the sparse-checkout settings in
           other worktrees, the set subcommand will upgrade your
           repository config to use worktree-specific config if not
           already present. The sparsity defined by the arguments to the
           set subcommand are stored in the worktree-specific
           sparse-checkout file. See git-worktree(1) and the
           documentation of extensions.worktreeConfig in git-config(1)
           for more details.

           When the --stdin option is provided, the directories or
           patterns are read from standard in as a newline-delimited
           list instead of from the arguments.

           By default, the input list is considered a list of
           directories, matching the output of git ls-tree -d
           --name-only. This includes interpreting pathnames that begin
           with a double quote (") as C-style quoted strings. Note that
           all files under the specified directories (at any depth) will
           be included in the sparse checkout, as well as files that are
           siblings of either the given directory or any of its
           ancestors (see CONE PATTERN SET below for more details). In
           the past, this was not the default, and --cone needed to be
           specified or core.sparseCheckoutCone needed to be enabled.

           When --no-cone is passed, the input list is considered a list
           of patterns. This mode has a number of drawbacks, including
           not working with some options like --sparse-index. As
           explained in the "Non-cone Problems" section below, we do not
           recommend using it.

           Use the --[no-]sparse-index option to use a sparse index (the
           default is to not use it). A sparse index reduces the size of
           the index to be more closely aligned with your
           sparse-checkout definition. This can have significant
           performance advantages for commands such as git status or git
           add. This feature is still experimental. Some commands might
           be slower with a sparse index until they are properly
           integrated with the feature.

           WARNING: Using a sparse index requires modifying the index in
           a way that is not completely understood by external tools. If
           you have trouble with this compatibility, then run git
           sparse-checkout init --no-sparse-index to rewrite your index
           to not be sparse. Older versions of Git will not understand
           the sparse directory entries index extension and may fail to
           interact with your repository until it is disabled.

       add
           Update the sparse-checkout file to include additional
           directories (in cone mode) or patterns (in non-cone mode). By
           default, these directories or patterns are read from the
           command-line arguments, but they can be read from stdin using
           the --stdin option.

       reapply
           Reapply the sparsity pattern rules to paths in the working
           tree. Commands like merge or rebase can materialize paths to
           do their work (e.g. in order to show you a conflict), and
           other sparse-checkout commands might fail to sparsify an
           individual file (e.g. because it has unstaged changes or
           conflicts). In such cases, it can make sense to run git
           sparse-checkout reapply later after cleaning up affected
           paths (e.g. resolving conflicts, undoing or committing
           changes, etc.).

           The reapply command can also take --[no-]cone and
           --[no-]sparse-index flags, with the same meaning as the flags
           from the set command, in order to change which sparsity mode
           you are using without needing to also respecify all sparsity
           paths.

       disable
           Disable the core.sparseCheckout config setting, and restore
           the working directory to include all files.

       init
           Deprecated command that behaves like set with no specified
           paths. May be removed in the future.

           Historically, set did not handle all the necessary config
           settings, which meant that both init and set had to be
           called. Invoking both meant the init step would first remove
           nearly all tracked files (and in cone mode, ignored files
           too), then the set step would add many of the tracked files
           (but not ignored files) back. In addition to the lost files,
           the performance and UI of this combination was poor.

           Also, historically, init would not actually initialize the
           sparse-checkout file if it already existed. This meant it was
           possible to return to a sparse-checkout without remembering
           which paths to pass to a subsequent set or add command.
           However, --cone and --sparse-index options would not be
           remembered across the disable command, so the easy restore of
           calling a plain init decreased in utility.

       check-rules
           Check whether sparsity rules match one or more paths.

           By default check-rules reads a list of paths from stdin and
           outputs only the ones that match the current sparsity rules.
           The input is expected to consist of one path per line,
           matching the output of git ls-tree --name-only including that
           pathnames that begin with a double quote (") are interpreted
           as C-style quoted strings.

           When called with the --rules-file <file> flag the input files
           are matched against the sparse checkout rules found in <file>
           instead of the current ones. The rules in the files are
           expected to be in the same form as accepted by git
           sparse-checkout set --stdin (in particular, they must be
           newline-delimited).

           By default, the rules passed to the --rules-file option are
           interpreted as cone mode directories. To pass non-cone mode
           patterns with --rules-file, combine the option with the
           --no-cone option.

           When called with the -z flag, the format of the paths input
           on stdin as well as the output paths are \0 terminated and
           not quoted. Note that this does not apply to the format of
           the rules passed with the --rules-file option.

EXAMPLES         top

       git sparse-checkout set MY/DIR1 SUB/DIR2
           Change to a sparse checkout with all files (at any depth)
           under MY/DIR1/ and SUB/DIR2/ present in the working copy
           (plus all files immediately under MY/ and SUB/ and the
           toplevel directory). If already in a sparse checkout, change
           which files are present in the working copy to this new
           selection. Note that this command will also delete all
           ignored files in any directory that no longer has either
           tracked or non-ignored-untracked files present.

       git sparse-checkout disable
           Repopulate the working directory with all files, disabling
           sparse checkouts.

       git sparse-checkout add SOME/DIR/ECTORY
           Add all files under SOME/DIR/ECTORY/ (at any depth) to the
           sparse checkout, as well as all files immediately under
           SOME/DIR/ and immediately under SOME/. Must already be in a
           sparse checkout before using this command.

       git sparse-checkout reapply
           It is possible for commands to update the working tree in a
           way that does not respect the selected sparsity directories.
           This can come from tools external to Git writing files, or
           even affect Git commands because of either special cases
           (such as hitting conflicts when merging/rebasing), or because
           some commands didn’t fully support sparse checkouts (e.g. the
           old recursive merge backend had only limited support). This
           command reapplies the existing sparse directory
           specifications to make the working directory match.

INTERNALS — SPARSE CHECKOUT         top

       "Sparse checkout" allows populating the working directory
       sparsely. It uses the skip-worktree bit (see git-update-index(1))
       to tell Git whether a file in the working directory is worth
       looking at. If the skip-worktree bit is set, and the file is not
       present in the working tree, then its absence is ignored. Git
       will avoid populating the contents of those files, which makes a
       sparse checkout helpful when working in a repository with many
       files, but only a few are important to the current user.

       The $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout file is used to define the
       skip-worktree reference bitmap. When Git updates the working
       directory, it updates the skip-worktree bits in the index based
       on this file. The files matching the patterns in the file will
       appear in the working directory, and the rest will not.

INTERNALS — NON-CONE PROBLEMS         top

       The $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout file populated by the set and
       add subcommands is defined to be a bunch of patterns (one per
       line) using the same syntax as .gitignore files. In cone mode,
       these patterns are restricted to matching directories (and users
       only ever need supply or see directory names), while in non-cone
       mode any gitignore-style pattern is permitted. Using the full
       gitignore-style patterns in non-cone mode has a number of
       shortcomings:

       •   Fundamentally, it makes various worktree-updating processes
           (pull, merge, rebase, switch, reset, checkout, etc.) require
           O(N*M) pattern matches, where N is the number of patterns and
           M is the number of paths in the index. This scales poorly.

       •   Avoiding the scaling issue has to be done via limiting the
           number of patterns via specifying leading directory name or
           glob.

       •   Passing globs on the command line is error-prone as users may
           forget to quote the glob, causing the shell to expand it into
           all matching files and pass them all individually along to
           sparse-checkout set/add. While this could also be a problem
           with e.g. "git grep — *.c", mistakes with grep/log/status
           appear in the immediate output. With sparse-checkout, the
           mistake gets recorded at the time the sparse-checkout command
           is run and might not be problematic until the user later
           switches branches or rebases or merges, thus putting a delay
           between the user’s error and when they have a chance to
           catch/notice it.

       •   Related to the previous item, sparse-checkout has an add
           subcommand but no remove subcommand. Even if a remove
           subcommand were added, undoing an accidental unquoted glob
           runs the risk of "removing too much", as it may remove
           entries that had been included before the accidental add.

       •   Non-cone mode uses gitignore-style patterns to select what to
           include (with the exception of negated patterns), while
           .gitignore files use gitignore-style patterns to select what
           to exclude (with the exception of negated patterns). The
           documentation on gitignore-style patterns usually does not
           talk in terms of matching or non-matching, but on what the
           user wants to "exclude". This can cause confusion for users
           trying to learn how to specify sparse-checkout patterns to
           get their desired behavior.

       •   Every other git subcommand that wants to provide "special
           path pattern matching" of some sort uses pathspecs, but
           non-cone mode for sparse-checkout uses gitignore patterns,
           which feels inconsistent.

       •   It has edge cases where the "right" behavior is unclear. Two
           examples:

               First, two users are in a subdirectory, and the first runs
                  git sparse-checkout set '/toplevel-dir/*.c'
               while the second runs
                  git sparse-checkout set relative-dir
               Should those arguments be transliterated into
                  current/subdirectory/toplevel-dir/*.c
               and
                  current/subdirectory/relative-dir
               before inserting into the sparse-checkout file?  The user who typed
               the first command is probably aware that arguments to set/add are
               supposed to be patterns in non-cone mode, and probably would not be
               happy with such a transliteration.  However, many gitignore-style
               patterns are just paths, which might be what the user who typed the
               second command was thinking, and they'd be upset if their argument
               wasn't transliterated.

               Second, what should bash-completion complete on for set/add commands
               for non-cone users?  If it suggests paths, is it exacerbating the
               problem above?  Also, if it suggests paths, what if the user has a
               file or directory that begins with either a '!' or '#' or has a '*',
               '\', '?', '[', or ']' in its name?  And if it suggests paths, will
               it complete "/pro" to "/proc" (in the root filesystem) rather than to
               "/progress.txt" in the current directory?  (Note that users are
               likely to want to start paths with a leading '/' in non-cone mode,
               for the same reason that .gitignore files often have one.)
               Completing on files or directories might give nasty surprises in
               all these cases.

       •   The excessive flexibility made other extensions essentially
           impractical.  --sparse-index is likely impossible in non-cone
           mode; even if it is somehow feasible, it would have been far
           more work to implement and may have been too slow in
           practice. Some ideas for adding coupling between partial
           clones and sparse checkouts are only practical with a more
           restricted set of paths as well.

       For all these reasons, non-cone mode is deprecated. Please switch
       to using cone mode.

INTERNALS — CONE MODE HANDLING         top

       The "cone mode", which is the default, lets you specify only what
       directories to include. For any directory specified, all paths
       below that directory will be included, and any paths immediately
       under leading directories (including the toplevel directory) will
       also be included. Thus, if you specified the directory
       Documentation/technical/ then your sparse checkout would contain:

       •   all files in the toplevel-directory

       •   all files immediately under Documentation/

       •   all files at any depth under Documentation/technical/

       Also, in cone mode, even if no directories are specified, then
       the files in the toplevel directory will be included.

       When changing the sparse-checkout patterns in cone mode, Git will
       inspect each tracked directory that is not within the
       sparse-checkout cone to see if it contains any untracked files.
       If all of those files are ignored due to the .gitignore patterns,
       then the directory will be deleted. If any of the untracked files
       within that directory is not ignored, then no deletions will
       occur within that directory and a warning message will appear. If
       these files are important, then reset your sparse-checkout
       definition so they are included, use git add and git commit to
       store them, then remove any remaining files manually to ensure
       Git can behave optimally.

       See also the "Internals — Cone Pattern Set" section to learn how
       the directories are transformed under the hood into a subset of
       the Full Pattern Set of sparse-checkout.

INTERNALS — FULL PATTERN SET         top

       The full pattern set allows for arbitrary pattern matches and
       complicated inclusion/exclusion rules. These can result in O(N*M)
       pattern matches when updating the index, where N is the number of
       patterns and M is the number of paths in the index. To combat
       this performance issue, a more restricted pattern set is allowed
       when core.sparseCheckoutCone is enabled.

       The sparse-checkout file uses the same syntax as .gitignore
       files; see gitignore(5) for details. Here, though, the patterns
       are usually being used to select which files to include rather
       than which files to exclude. (However, it can get a bit confusing
       since gitignore-style patterns have negations defined by patterns
       which begin with a !, so you can also select files to not
       include.)

       For example, to select everything, and then to remove the file
       unwanted (so that every file will appear in your working tree
       except the file named unwanted):

           git sparse-checkout set --no-cone '/*' '!unwanted'

       These patterns are just placed into the
       $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout as-is, so the contents of that file
       at this point would be

           /*
           !unwanted

       See also the "Sparse Checkout" section of git-read-tree(1) to
       learn more about the gitignore-style patterns used in sparse
       checkouts.

INTERNALS — CONE PATTERN SET         top

       In cone mode, only directories are accepted, but they are
       translated into the same gitignore-style patterns used in the
       full pattern set. We refer to the particular patterns used in
       those mode as being of one of two types:

        1. Recursive: All paths inside a directory are included.

        2. Parent: All files immediately inside a directory are
           included.

       Since cone mode always includes files at the toplevel, when
       running git sparse-checkout set with no directories specified,
       the toplevel directory is added as a parent pattern. At this
       point, the sparse-checkout file contains the following patterns:

           /*
           !/*/

       This says "include everything immediately under the toplevel
       directory, but nothing at any level below that."

       When in cone mode, the git sparse-checkout set subcommand takes a
       list of directories. The command git sparse-checkout set A/B/C
       sets the directory A/B/C as a recursive pattern, the directories
       A and A/B are added as parent patterns. The resulting
       sparse-checkout file is now

           /*
           !/*/
           /A/
           !/A/*/
           /A/B/
           !/A/B/*/
           /A/B/C/

       Here, order matters, so the negative patterns are overridden by
       the positive patterns that appear lower in the file.

       Unless core.sparseCheckoutCone is explicitly set to false, Git
       will parse the sparse-checkout file expecting patterns of these
       types. Git will warn if the patterns do not match. If the
       patterns do match the expected format, then Git will use faster
       hash-based algorithms to compute inclusion in the
       sparse-checkout. If they do not match, git will behave as though
       core.sparseCheckoutCone was false, regardless of its setting.

       In the cone mode case, despite the fact that full patterns are
       written to the $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout file, the git
       sparse-checkout list subcommand will list the directories that
       define the recursive patterns. For the example sparse-checkout
       file above, the output is as follows:

           $ git sparse-checkout list
           A/B/C

       If core.ignoreCase=true, then the pattern-matching algorithm will
       use a case-insensitive check. This corrects for case mismatched
       filenames in the git sparse-checkout set command to reflect the
       expected cone in the working directory.

INTERNALS — SUBMODULES         top

       If your repository contains one or more submodules, then
       submodules are populated based on interactions with the git
       submodule command. Specifically, git submodule init -- <path>
       will ensure the submodule at <path> is present, while git
       submodule deinit [-f] -- <path> will remove the files for the
       submodule at <path> (including any untracked files, uncommitted
       changes, and unpushed history). Similar to how sparse-checkout
       removes files from the working tree but still leaves entries in
       the index, deinitialized submodules are removed from the working
       directory but still have an entry in the index.

       Since submodules may have unpushed changes or untracked files,
       removing them could result in data loss. Thus, changing sparse
       inclusion/exclusion rules will not cause an already checked out
       submodule to be removed from the working copy. Said another way,
       just as checkout will not cause submodules to be automatically
       removed or initialized even when switching between branches that
       remove or add submodules, using sparse-checkout to reduce or
       expand the scope of "interesting" files will not cause submodules
       to be automatically deinitialized or initialized either.

       Further, the above facts mean that there are multiple reasons
       that "tracked" files might not be present in the working copy:
       sparsity pattern application from sparse-checkout, and submodule
       initialization state. Thus, commands like git grep that work on
       tracked files in the working copy may return results that are
       limited by either or both of these restrictions.

SEE ALSO         top

       git-read-tree(1) gitignore(5)

GIT         top

       Part of the git(1) suite

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the git (Git distributed version control
       system) project.  Information about the project can be found at
       ⟨http://git-scm.com/⟩.  If you have a bug report for this manual
       page, see ⟨http://git-scm.com/community⟩.  This page was obtained
       from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://github.com/git/git.git⟩ on 2023-12-22.  (At that time,
       the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
       repository was 2023-12-20.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
       is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

Git 2.43.0.174.g055bb6         2023-12-20         GIT-SPARSE-CHECKOUT(1)

Pages that refer to this page: git(1)git-add(1)git-clone(1)git-config(1)git-read-tree(1)git-rm(1)git-update-index(1)scalar(1)