Browse and display files in a git repo without cloning

Is there a way to browse and display files in a git repo without cloning it first? I can do those in svn using the commands:

svn ls /path/to/repo
svn cat /path/to/repo/file-in-repo

I can supposedly use git show but doing:

git show /path/to/repo
git show HEAD:/path/to/repo

result to

fatal: Not a git repository

The command you want is git ls-remote which allows you to get some information about remote repositories, but you cant show history or list directories or anything of that level: essentially it only lets you see the remote objects at a very high-level (you can see the current HEADs and tags for example).

The only real way to do what you want (if I understand correctly) would be to use ssh to run a remote command and return the results, for example:

ssh me@otherhost "cd repo && git log -n 10"

What you want would be lovely functionality if they could add it, but from what I read it's not very easy since getting history etc needs a lot of information to be local to git, and at that point you may as well have done a git fetch.

Git is distributed version control system, while Subversion is centralized (client-server) version control system. They work differently; get used to that. Please read my answer explaining the consequences of that difference to git equivalent of svn status -u question at StackOverflow.

Repeating myself a bit: in centralized version control system (like CVS or Subversion) almost all commands are processed on server, and involve network. Very few commands are performed locally. Note that to have good performance of "svn status" and "svn diff" Subversion stores 'pristine copy' of checked-out version on client, to not have to involve network transfer for those common operations (this means that Subversion checkout = 2 x size of working directory at least).

In distributed version control system (like Git, Mercurial or Bazaar), where you have local copy (clone) of a whole repository, almost all commands are performed on client. Very few commands require network connection to other repository (to server).

The number of command you can perform on server is limited.

• You can list all references on remote with "git ls-remote <URL>".
• You can get snapshot of (part) of repository (if remote server enabled it) with
  "git archive --remote=<URL> HEAD".
• You can clone only a few last commits (so called "shallow clone") with
  "git clone --depth=1 <URL>".
• If server provides git web interface to repository, you can use it to browse.

Take a look at http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Internals-Transfer-Protocols for info on how to do this over some transport protocols. Note this won't work for standard git over SSH.

For git over SSH, an up-to-date server-side git should allow you to git-archive directly from the remote, which you could then e.g. pipe to "tar t" to get a list of all files in a given commit.

GitHub is svn compatible so you can use svn ls

svn ls https://github.com/user/repository.git/branches/master/

BitBucket supports git archive so you can download tar archive and list archived files. It is not very efficient but works:

git archive --remote=git@bitbucket.org:repository HEAD directory | tar -t

Not the exact, but a way around.

Use GitHub Developer API

1. Opening this will get you the recent commits.

https://api.github.com/repos/learningequality/ka-lite/commits

You can get the specific commit details by attaching the commit hash in the end of above url.

2. All the files ( You need sha for the main tree)

   https://api.github.com/repos/learningequality/ka-lite/git/trees/7b698a988683b161bdcd48a949b01e2b336b4c01

I hope this may help.

While you have to checkout a repository, you can skip checking out any files with --no-checkout and --depth 1:

$ time git clone --no-checkout --depth 1 https://github.com/torvalds/linux .
Cloning into '.'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 75646, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (75646/75646), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (71197/71197), done.
remote: Total 75646 (delta 6176), reused 22237 (delta 3672), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (75646/75646), 201.46 MiB | 7.27 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (6176/6176), done.

real    0m46.117s
user    0m13.412s
sys     0m19.641s

And while there is only a .git directory:

$ ls -al
total 0
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  staff    96 Dec 26 23:57 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 71 root  staff  2272 Dec 27 00:03 ..
drwxr-xr-x  12 root  staff   384 Dec 26 23:58 .git

you can get a directory listing via:

$ git ls-tree --full-name --name-only -r HEAD | head
.clang-format
.cocciconfig
.get_maintainer.ignore
.gitattributes
.gitignore
.mailmap
COPYING
CREDITS
Documentation/.gitignore
Documentation/ABI/README

or get the number of files via:

$ git ls-tree -r HEAD | wc -l
   71259

or get the total file size via:

$ git ls-tree -l -r HEAD | awk '/^[^-]/ {s+=$4} END {print s}'
1006679487

This is probably considered dirty by some, but a very practical solution in case of github repositories is just to make a script, e.g. "git-ls":

#!/bin/sh
remote_url=${1:? "$0 requires URL as argument"}
curl -s $remote_url | grep js-directory-link | sed "s/.* title=\"\(.*\)\".*/\1/"

Make it executable and reachable of course: chmod a+x git-ls; sudo cp git-ls /usr/local/bin. Now, you just run it as you wish:

git-ls https://github.com/mrquincle/aim-bzr
git-ls https://github.com/mrquincle/aim-bzr/tree/master/aim_modules

Also know that there is a git instaweb utility for your local files. To have the ability to show files and have a server like that does in my opinion not destroy any of the inherent decentralized characteristics of git.