复制克隆的仓库并签出新分支

Question

If I clone a repo's master branch, can I copy this repo and paste it into another folder and checkout another branch?

The reason I'm asking is because the repo I'm cloning is huge, and each track requires a new database to run properly. Because of this, I've opted to create a new directory for each track I'm using.

Thanks!

Answer 1

There are several things you can do.

Probably the best thing is to attach additional work trees to the repo. This avoids duplicating the database that contains project history. It avoids having to keep two sets of refs in sync. It's generally the way I would recommend to keep multiple versions concurrently checked out.

So I have master checked out, and I want to check out a branch named other-version as well:

git worktree add /path/to/new/working/directory other-version

See https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree for more info on linked work trees.

If for some reason this doesn't meet your needs, you can create a second clone. You can either clone from the origin a second time, or you can clone from the local copy you already have. (Cloning from the local means that by default you push and fetch from one local repo to the other, which could be good or bad. An advantage of cloning locally is that git may be able to avoid duplicating the database through the use of links.)

If you don't want the locals to be interrelated, but you don't want to re-clone the large repo from the remote, you could

cd /path/to/repo/parent/dir
git clone file://localhost/path/to/repo/parent/dir/repo1 repo2
cd repo2
git remote remove origin
git remote add origin url/to/the/original/remote

This would be very similar to just copying the repo on disk per your original question, but I'd recommend this type of procedure instead (mostly for reasons of paranoia).