Shallow clone with JGIT

Question

How I can do

git clone --depth 1 ...

with JGIT library?

Sedimentation

Answer 1

You can't, JGit doesn't yet support shallow clones on the client side (it does on the server side, though).

Mindy

this bug indicates that this is available now. Is it the case? bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=301627 – Payment

Anyone found a way to do this? – Gildagildas

Hmm, Jgit still doesn't support shallow clone as of this post. If you're like me and wondered how the Jenkins plugin offers a shallow option, then you also wouldn't be surprised to hear that those guys implemented an abstraction that falls back to jgit when linus git isn't available. I don't know how to use this outside of jenkins but here's the part with the abstraction: github.com/jenkinsci/git-client-plugin/blob/master/src/main/…. – Nate

To clarify @Payment 's comment: the mentioned bug is about the server implementation inside JGit, the server now supports shallow fetch if requested (see comment #13). git clone --depth however is not implemented yet, see bug 475615: Support "git clone --depth" in CloneCommand – Organizer

There is a WIP implementation of this on GitHub. – Theis

@Theis do you have an example? – Contaminate

By now bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=475615 has been resolved and JGit 6.3.0 does support shallow clones / fetches on the client side. – Coom

Some 11 years after the question was originally posed, it looks like an implementation now exists, in the (as yet unreleased) 6.5. Here's the PR: git.eclipse.org/r/c/jgit/jgit/+/196477 – Directional

Answer 2

According to the Release notes for version 6.5.0, this has been released on March 15, 2023.

You can now use any of

• .setDepth(Integer)
• .setShallowSince(Instant)
• .setShallowSince(OffsetDateTime)

for example like so:

Git.cloneRepository().setDepth(1)

Oslo