Downloading a subdirectory from GitHub without history —28 May 2014

Ever wanted to get just a subdirectory of a large project from GitHub without history? Thanks to GitHub supporting Subversion clients, and thanks to the svn command line client if you have it, you can, very easily:

1. Browse to the project and subdirectory you want to clone, for example: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/tree/master/docs

2. Replace tree/master with trunk in the URL, and run svn export on it, for example:

    svn export https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/trunk/docs
   

This will create a local directory docs, with the content of the subdirectory on GitHub, without version control history.

You can give a different name to the local directory with an extra command line argument, for example:

svn export https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/trunk/docs /tmp/xbmc-docs