Overview
Shallow cloning of a git repository can offer some performance improvement, especially for larger projects with a number of commits, by pulling the smallest number of changes possible. This can be implemented manually using a custom cloning step.
Configuring your shallow checkout
To fetch and modify the default checkout step, see this article: How do I modify the checkout step?
Some flags to note that can be added to the git clone <repository> command:
--depth <depth>will limit the number of commits fetched for the repository or branch being checked out.--shallow-since=<date>will do a shallow checkout from the date specified (date should be formatted as YYYY-MM-DD)--no-tagsprevents git from cloning any tags from the repository (if the installed version of git supports it).
Here is an example:
version: 2.1jobs:
build:
docker:
- image: cimg/node:latest
steps:
- run: git clone --depth 5 "$CIRCLE_REPOSITORY_URL" --branch "$CIRCLE_BRANCH"You can read more information on Git's website:
Support for Shallow Checkouts on Windows
Shallow checkout and git clone commands with a --depth parameter are not guaranteed to work in Windows Execution environments on CircleCI.
There is an open feature request which can be found at the link below:
There are a few workarounds that can be used here:
Creating a cache for
.git