No, don’t do that. That modifies the commit hashes, so tags no longer work.
git clone --filter=blob:none is where it’s at.
I don’t understand how we’re all using git and it’s not just some backend utility that we all use a sane wrapper for instead.
Everytime you want to do anything with git it’s a weird series or arcane nonsense commands and then someone cuts in saying “oh yeah but that will destroy x y and z, you have to use this other arcane nonsense command that also sounds nothing like you’re trying to do” and you sit there having no idea why either of them even kind of accomplish what you want.
It’s because git is a complex tool to solve complex problems. If you’re one hacker working alone, RCS will do an acceptable job. As soon as you add a second hacker, things change and RCS will quickly show its limitations. FOSS version control went through CVS and SVN before finally arriving at git, and there are good reasons we made each of those transitions. For that matter, CVS and SVN had plenty of arcane stuff to fix weird scenarios, too, and in my subjective experience, git doesn’t pile on appreciably more.
You think deleting an empty directory should be easy? CVS laughs at your effort, puny developer.
There are tons of wrappers for git, but they all kinda suck. They either don’t let you do something the cli does, so you have to resort to the arcane magicks every now and then anyways. Or they just obfuscate things to the point where you have no idea what it’s doing, making it impossible to know how to fix things if (when) it fucks things up.
Git is complicated, but then again, it’s a tool with a lot of options. Could it be nicer and less abstract in its use? Sure!
However, if you compare what goes does, and how it does, to it’s competitors, then git is quite amazing. 5-10 years ago it was all svn, the dark times. Simpler tool and an actual headache to use.
You are not entirely wrong, but just as some advice I would refrain from displaying fear of the command line in interviews.
What are you smoking? Shallow clones don’t modify commit hashes.
The only thing that you lose is history, but that usually isn’t a big deal.
--filter=blob:none probably also won’t help too much here since the problem with node_modules is more about millions of individual files rather than large files (although both can be annoying).
From github’s blog:
git clone --depth=1 <url>creates a shallow clone. These clones truncate the commit history to reduce the clone size. This creates some unexpected behavior issues, limiting which Git commands are possible. These clones also put undue stress on later fetches, so they are strongly discouraged for developer use. They are helpful for some build environments where the repository will be deleted after a single build.
Maybe the hashes aren’t different, but the important part is that comparisons beyond the fetched depth don’t work: git can’t know if a shallowly cloned repo has a common ancestor with some given commit outside the range, e.g. a tag.
Blobless clones don’t have that limitation. Git will download a hash+path for each file, but it won’t download the contents, so it still takes much less space and time.
If you want to skip all file data without any limitations, you can do git clone --filter=tree:0 which doesn’t even download the metadata
