How to convert a Git shallow clone to a full clone?

Question

Follow-up of this so-question: if I have a shallow clone, how to fetch all older commits to make it a full clone?

Answer 1

The below command (git version 1.8.3) will convert the shallow clone to regular one

git fetch --unshallow

Then, to get access to all the branches on origin (thanks @Peter in the comments)

git config remote.origin.fetch "+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*"
git fetch origin

Answer 2

EDIT: git fetch --unshallow now is an option (thanks Jack O'Connor).

You can run git fetch --depth=2147483647

From the docs on shallow :

The special depth 2147483647 (or 0x7fffffff, the largest positive number a signed 32-bit integer can contain) means infinite depth.

Answer 3

I needed to deepen a repo only down to a particular commit.

After reading man git-fetch , I found out that one cannot specify a commit, but can specify a date:

git fetch --shallow-since=15/11/2012

For those who need incremental deepening, another man quote:

 --deepen=<depth>

Similar to --depth, except it specifies the number of commits from the current shallow boundary instead of from the tip of each remote branch history.

Answer 4

Two ways to achieve Shallow Clone to Deep Clone.:

1. Used the following steps to download the branch: (This downloads the shallow copy of the branch and then converts it into a Full Clone ie bring complete branch and its history).

   a. git clone -b branch http://git.repository/customSP01.git --depth 1

This does a shallow clone (with the depth-option) only fetches only one single branch (at your requested depth).

b. cd customSP01
c. git fetch -depth=100
d. get fetch -depth=500
....
e. git fetch --unshallow    

//The above command will convert the shallow clone to regular one. However, this doesn't bring all the branches:

Then, to get access to all the branches.

f. git remote set-branches origin '*'

[This Step can also be done manually by editing following line in.git/config.

fetch = +refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master

to (replace master with *):

fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* ]

g. git fetch -v

This converts the Shallow Clone into Deep Clone with all the History and Branch details.

---

2. You can avoid steps f and g, if you use the below instead of command present in step a. to do the shallow clone:

   git clone -b branch --no-single-branch http://git.repository/customSP01.git --depth 1

Answer 5

You can try this:

git fetch --update-shallow

Answer 6

None of the above messages did the trick. I'm trying to work with git tags starting from a shallow clone.

First I tried

git fetch --update-shallow

which kind of worked half-way through. Yet, no tags available

git fetch --depth=1000000

This last command really fetched the tags and I could finally execute

git checkout -b master-v1.1.0 tags/v1.1.0

and be done with it.

HTH