How do i clone an old commit into a new repo?

Question

I used git to track changes in a project. The first couple of commits were all about setting up the environment and including a bunch of plugins to get a bare framework.

How do i start a new project starting from one of the old commits from my existing project?

Answer 1

You could use git archive :

git archive --format=zip --prefix MyNewProj/ <oldcommit> -o ../basicproject.zip
cd ..
unzip basicproject.zip
cd MyNewProj
git init

This will create a zip archive of all tracked files (not any ignored, like binaries) at the commit <oldcommit> . Then you can unzip it into a new project.

Answer 2

您可以从任何旧点创建分支：

git checkout -b topic <oldpoint>

Answer 3

Note that using a zip format can be problematic on very large repo, depending on the unzip software used (especially on Windows).
That is what git 2.6 (Q3/Q4 2005) addresses:

See commit 88329ca , commit 0f747f9 , commit 19ee294 (22 Aug 2015) by René Scharfe.
Suggested-by: Johannes Schauer .
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 565f575 , 01 Sep 2015)}

archive-zip : support more than 65535 entries

Support more than 65535 entries cleanly by writing a "zip64 end of central directory record" (with a 64-bit field for the number of entries) before the usual "end of central directory record" (which contains only a 16-bit field).
InfoZIP's zip does the same.
Archives with 65535 or less entries are not affected.

Programs that extract all files like InfoZIP's zip and 7-Zip ignored the field and could extract all files already.
Software that relies on the ZIP file directory to show a list of contained files quickly to simulate to normal directory like Windows'built-in ZIP functionality only saw a subset of the included files .

Windows supports ZIP64 since Vista .

Here, that should not matter, unless the commit is a very large one.