Tarballing without Git metadata
FindPackagingTarXargsGrepFind Problem Overview
My source tree contains several directories which are using Git source control, and I need to tarball the whole tree excluding any references to the Git metadata or custom log files.
I thought I'd have a go using a combination of find/egrep/xargs/tar, but somehow the tar file contains the .git directories and the *.log files.
This is what I have:
find -type f . | egrep -v '\.git|\.log' | xargs tar rvf ~/app.tar
Can someone explain my misunderstanding here? Why is tar processing the files that find and egrep are filtering?
I'm open to other techniques as well.
Find Solutions
Solution 1 - Find
You will get a nasty surprise when the number of files increase to more than one xargs command: Then you will first make a tar file of the first files and then overwrite the same tar file with the rest of the files.
GNU tar has the --exclude option which will solve this issue:
tar cvf ~/app.tar --exclude .git --exclude "*.log" .
Solution 2 - Find
You can try directly with the tar option --exclude-vcs:
--exclude-vcs:
Exclude version control system directories
For example:
tar cvfj nameoffile.tar.bz2 directory/ --exclude-vcs
It works with Git.
Solution 3 - Find
Try something like this:
git archive --format=tar -o ~/tarball.tar -v HEAD
Add your .log files and everything else you don't want to be packed to your .gitignore file.
Solution 4 - Find
To exclude version control system directories:
tar --exclude-vcs
This will exclude svn, git metafiles etc.
Solution 5 - Find
The newer GNU tar has the option to exclude version control directories automatically by using flag --exclude-vcs . This will take care of .git as well.
Solution 6 - Find
[slap] Bah! The parameters to find were in the wrong order! I didn't see the warnings because they whizzed off the screen. This allowed '.' to pass through egrep which caused tar to slurp up everything.
That will teach me for drowning important messages in verbose debug.
This works:
find . -type f | egrep -v '\.git|\.log' | xargs tar cvf ~/app.tar
Solution 7 - Find
git-archive may be what you're looking for.
Solution 8 - Find
You could do that without grep. find is powerful
find . -type f -not \( -iname ".git" -or -iname ".log" \) | xargs ...
Solution 9 - Find
For doing it from outside the app directory:
tar cvfz app.tar.gz --exclude ".git/*" --exclude ".git" app/
Solution 10 - Find
For me, the .gitignore content is what I needed:
tar cvfz $PROJECT.tar.gz --exclude-from=$PROJECT/.gitignore $PROJECT
--exclude-from is reading the file's contents - and exlucde the patterns listed there