How to clone a specific branch in git?

Sometime engineers need to clone specific remote branch. This blog will help you to clone specific branch from remote.

Syntax

You need to specify the branch name with -b command switch. Here is the syntax of the command to clone the specific git branch.

$ git clone -b <BRANCH_NAME>  <GIT_REMOTE_URL>

Examples

Below are 2 methods to clone single and specific git branch!

Single branch with others details

The following command will clone the branch v1.0_travis_demo from the vermanotes/docker-spring-boot git repository.

$ git clone -b v1.0_travis_demo https://github.com/vermanotes/docker-spring-boot.git

The above command clones only the specific branch but fetches the details of other branches. You can view all branches details with command git branch -a

Only single branch

You can prevent fetching details for other branches by using --single-branch option as given below.

$ git clone -b v1.0_travis_demo --single-branch https://github.com/vermanotes/docker-spring-boot.git

You can view the active branch by running the command:

$ git branch

Happy coding!