How to handle big repositories with git

Shallow clone

Clone a repository keeping only the latest n commits of history. You can properly pull and push to repositories even from a shallow clone.

git clone --depth 1 remote-url

Clone only one branch

You can also limit the amount of history you clone by cloning a single branch

git clone URL --branch branch_name --single-branch [folder]

Sparse checkout

Original StackOverflow answer

mkdir <repo>
cd <repo>
git init
git remote add -f origin <url>
git config core.sparsecheckout true
echo "some/dir/" >> .git/info/sparse-checkout
echo "another/sub/tree" >> .git/info/sparse-checkout
git pull origin master

Another way:

git clone

git config core.sparsecheckout true

echo src/ > .git/info/sparse-checkout

git read-tree -m -u HEAD

Sparse checkout + shallow clone

Original StackOverflow answer

git init <repo>
cd <repo>
git remote add origin <url>
git config core.sparsecheckout true
echo "src/*" >> .git/info/sparse-checkout
git pull --depth=1 origin master

Disable delta compression for binary files

Original discussion

Configure a .gitattributes file as such:

*.jpg  binary -delta
*.png  binary -delta
*.psd  binary -delta

... and so on

More detailed story from Atlassian blog