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git: shallow clone and sparse checkout of submodule

Dec 12, 2014

If you have a huge repository (in size and in history) and want to add a subfolder to your project as a submodule you can follow the code in this example to save time and space using git's shallow clone and sparse checkout feature. It is a bit more complicated in this example because I assume that you want your submodule to track a non-default branch, called `mybranch`, instead of the `master` branch. Also I assume you already have a checkout of  our huge repository somewhere, so it can be used as an argument to the --reference option of git clone. Things could probably get a lot simpler when using the default branch and just using a normal clone (with no reference  repo). After following the commands in these examples you can use `git submodule update` and `git submodule update --remote` as normal.