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GIT-SPARSE-CHECKOUT(1) Git Manual GIT-SPARSE-CHECKOUT(1)
git-sparse-checkout - Reduce your working tree to a subset of
tracked files
git sparse-checkout (init | list | set | add | reapply | disable | check-rules) [<options>]
This command is used to create sparse checkouts, which change the
working tree from having all tracked files present to only having
a subset of those files. It can also switch which subset of files
are present, or undo and go back to having all tracked files
present in the working copy.
The subset of files is chosen by providing a list of directories
in cone mode (the default), or by providing a list of patterns in
non-cone mode.
When in a sparse-checkout, other Git commands behave a bit
differently. For example, switching branches will not update paths
outside the sparse-checkout directories/patterns, and git commit
-a will not record paths outside the sparse-checkout
directories/patterns as deleted.
THIS COMMAND IS EXPERIMENTAL. ITS BEHAVIOR, AND THE BEHAVIOR OF
OTHER COMMANDS IN THE PRESENCE OF SPARSE-CHECKOUTS, WILL LIKELY
CHANGE IN THE FUTURE.
list
Describe the directories or patterns in the sparse-checkout
file.
set
Enable the necessary sparse-checkout config settings
(core.sparseCheckout, core.sparseCheckoutCone, and
index.sparse) if they are not already set to the desired
values, populate the sparse-checkout file from the list of
arguments following the set subcommand, and update the working
directory to match.
To ensure that adjusting the sparse-checkout settings within a
worktree does not alter the sparse-checkout settings in other
worktrees, the set subcommand will upgrade your repository
config to use worktree-specific config if not already present.
The sparsity defined by the arguments to the set subcommand
are stored in the worktree-specific sparse-checkout file. See
git-worktree(1) and the documentation of
extensions.worktreeConfig in git-config(1) for more details.
When the --stdin option is provided, the directories or
patterns are read from standard in as a newline-delimited list
instead of from the arguments.
By default, the input list is considered a list of
directories, matching the output of git ls-tree -d
--name-only. This includes interpreting pathnames that begin
with a double quote (") as C-style quoted strings. Note that
all files under the specified directories (at any depth) will
be included in the sparse checkout, as well as files that are
siblings of either the given directory or any of its ancestors
(see CONE PATTERN SET below for more details). In the past,
this was not the default, and --cone needed to be specified or
core.sparseCheckoutCone needed to be enabled.
When --no-cone is passed, the input list is considered a list
of patterns. This mode has a number of drawbacks, including
not working with some options like --sparse-index. As
explained in the "Non-cone Problems" section below, we do not
recommend using it.
Use the --[no-]sparse-index option to use a sparse index (the
default is to not use it). A sparse index reduces the size of
the index to be more closely aligned with your sparse-checkout
definition. This can have significant performance advantages
for commands such as git status or git add. This feature is
still experimental. Some commands might be slower with a
sparse index until they are properly integrated with the
feature.
WARNING: Using a sparse index requires modifying the index in
a way that is not completely understood by external tools. If
you have trouble with this compatibility, then run git
sparse-checkout init --no-sparse-index to rewrite your index
to not be sparse. Older versions of Git will not understand
the sparse directory entries index extension and may fail to
interact with your repository until it is disabled.
add
Update the sparse-checkout file to include additional
directories (in cone mode) or patterns (in non-cone mode). By
default, these directories or patterns are read from the
command-line arguments, but they can be read from stdin using
the --stdin option.
reapply
Reapply the sparsity pattern rules to paths in the working
tree. Commands like merge or rebase can materialize paths to
do their work (e.g. in order to show you a conflict), and
other sparse-checkout commands might fail to sparsify an
individual file (e.g. because it has unstaged changes or
conflicts). In such cases, it can make sense to run git
sparse-checkout reapply later after cleaning up affected paths
(e.g. resolving conflicts, undoing or committing changes,
etc.).
The reapply command can also take --[no-]cone and
--[no-]sparse-index flags, with the same meaning as the flags
from the set command, in order to change which sparsity mode
you are using without needing to also respecify all sparsity
paths.
disable
Disable the core.sparseCheckout config setting, and restore
the working directory to include all files.
init
Deprecated command that behaves like set with no specified
paths. May be removed in the future.
Historically, set did not handle all the necessary config
settings, which meant that both init and set had to be called.
Invoking both meant the init step would first remove nearly
all tracked files (and in cone mode, ignored files too), then
the set step would add many of the tracked files (but not
ignored files) back. In addition to the lost files, the
performance and UI of this combination was poor.
Also, historically, init would not actually initialize the
sparse-checkout file if it already existed. This meant it was
possible to return to a sparse-checkout without remembering
which paths to pass to a subsequent set or add command.
However, --cone and --sparse-index options would not be
remembered across the disable command, so the easy restore of
calling a plain init decreased in utility.
check-rules
Check whether sparsity rules match one or more paths.
By default check-rules reads a list of paths from stdin and
outputs only the ones that match the current sparsity rules.
The input is expected to consist of one path per line,
matching the output of git ls-tree --name-only including that
pathnames that begin with a double quote (") are interpreted
as C-style quoted strings.
When called with the --rules-file <file> flag the input files
are matched against the sparse checkout rules found in <file>
instead of the current ones. The rules in the files are
expected to be in the same form as accepted by git
sparse-checkout set --stdin (in particular, they must be
newline-delimited).
By default, the rules passed to the --rules-file option are
interpreted as cone mode directories. To pass non-cone mode
patterns with --rules-file, combine the option with the
--no-cone option.
When called with the -z flag, the format of the paths input on
stdin as well as the output paths are \0 terminated and not
quoted. Note that this does not apply to the format of the
rules passed with the --rules-file option.
git sparse-checkout set MY/DIR1 SUB/DIR2
Change to a sparse checkout with all files (at any depth)
under MY/DIR1/ and SUB/DIR2/ present in the working copy (plus
all files immediately under MY/ and SUB/ and the toplevel
directory). If already in a sparse checkout, change which
files are present in the working copy to this new selection.
Note that this command will also delete all ignored files in
any directory that no longer has either tracked or
non-ignored-untracked files present.
git sparse-checkout disable
Repopulate the working directory with all files, disabling
sparse checkouts.
git sparse-checkout add SOME/DIR/ECTORY
Add all files under SOME/DIR/ECTORY/ (at any depth) to the
sparse checkout, as well as all files immediately under
SOME/DIR/ and immediately under SOME/. Must already be in a
sparse checkout before using this command.
git sparse-checkout reapply
It is possible for commands to update the working tree in a
way that does not respect the selected sparsity directories.
This can come from tools external to Git writing files, or
even affect Git commands because of either special cases (such
as hitting conflicts when merging/rebasing), or because some
commands didn’t fully support sparse checkouts (e.g. the old
recursive merge backend had only limited support). This
command reapplies the existing sparse directory specifications
to make the working directory match.
"Sparse checkout" allows populating the working directory
sparsely. It uses the skip-worktree bit (see git-update-index(1))
to tell Git whether a file in the working directory is worth
looking at. If the skip-worktree bit is set, and the file is not
present in the working tree, then its absence is ignored. Git will
avoid populating the contents of those files, which makes a sparse
checkout helpful when working in a repository with many files, but
only a few are important to the current user.
The $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout file is used to define the
skip-worktree reference bitmap. When Git updates the working
directory, it updates the skip-worktree bits in the index based on
this file. The files matching the patterns in the file will appear
in the working directory, and the rest will not.
The $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout file populated by the set and
add subcommands is defined to be a bunch of patterns (one per
line) using the same syntax as .gitignore files. In cone mode,
these patterns are restricted to matching directories (and users
only ever need supply or see directory names), while in non-cone
mode any gitignore-style pattern is permitted. Using the full
gitignore-style patterns in non-cone mode has a number of
shortcomings:
• Fundamentally, it makes various worktree-updating processes
(pull, merge, rebase, switch, reset, checkout, etc.) require
O(N*M) pattern matches, where N is the number of patterns and
M is the number of paths in the index. This scales poorly.
• Avoiding the scaling issue has to be done via limiting the
number of patterns via specifying leading directory name or
glob.
• Passing globs on the command line is error-prone as users may
forget to quote the glob, causing the shell to expand it into
all matching files and pass them all individually along to
sparse-checkout set/add. While this could also be a problem
with e.g. "git grep — *.c", mistakes with grep/log/status
appear in the immediate output. With sparse-checkout, the
mistake gets recorded at the time the sparse-checkout command
is run and might not be problematic until the user later
switches branches or rebases or merges, thus putting a delay
between the user’s error and when they have a chance to
catch/notice it.
• Related to the previous item, sparse-checkout has an add
subcommand but no remove subcommand. Even if a remove
subcommand were added, undoing an accidental unquoted glob
runs the risk of "removing too much", as it may remove entries
that had been included before the accidental add.
• Non-cone mode uses gitignore-style patterns to select what to
include (with the exception of negated patterns), while
.gitignore files use gitignore-style patterns to select what
to exclude (with the exception of negated patterns). The
documentation on gitignore-style patterns usually does not
talk in terms of matching or non-matching, but on what the
user wants to "exclude". This can cause confusion for users
trying to learn how to specify sparse-checkout patterns to get
their desired behavior.
• Every other git subcommand that wants to provide "special path
pattern matching" of some sort uses pathspecs, but non-cone
mode for sparse-checkout uses gitignore patterns, which feels
inconsistent.
• It has edge cases where the "right" behavior is unclear. Two
examples:
First, two users are in a subdirectory, and the first runs
git sparse-checkout set '/toplevel-dir/*.c'
while the second runs
git sparse-checkout set relative-dir
Should those arguments be transliterated into
current/subdirectory/toplevel-dir/*.c
and
current/subdirectory/relative-dir
before inserting into the sparse-checkout file? The user who typed
the first command is probably aware that arguments to set/add are
supposed to be patterns in non-cone mode, and probably would not be
happy with such a transliteration. However, many gitignore-style
patterns are just paths, which might be what the user who typed the
second command was thinking, and they'd be upset if their argument
wasn't transliterated.
Second, what should bash-completion complete on for set/add commands
for non-cone users? If it suggests paths, is it exacerbating the
problem above? Also, if it suggests paths, what if the user has a
file or directory that begins with either a '!' or '#' or has a '*',
'\', '?', '[', or ']' in its name? And if it suggests paths, will
it complete "/pro" to "/proc" (in the root filesystem) rather than to
"/progress.txt" in the current directory? (Note that users are
likely to want to start paths with a leading '/' in non-cone mode,
for the same reason that .gitignore files often have one.)
Completing on files or directories might give nasty surprises in
all these cases.
• The excessive flexibility made other extensions essentially
impractical. --sparse-index is likely impossible in non-cone
mode; even if it is somehow feasible, it would have been far
more work to implement and may have been too slow in practice.
Some ideas for adding coupling between partial clones and
sparse checkouts are only practical with a more restricted set
of paths as well.
For all these reasons, non-cone mode is deprecated. Please switch
to using cone mode.
The "cone mode", which is the default, lets you specify only what
directories to include. For any directory specified, all paths
below that directory will be included, and any paths immediately
under leading directories (including the toplevel directory) will
also be included. Thus, if you specified the directory
Documentation/technical/ then your sparse checkout would contain:
• all files in the toplevel-directory
• all files immediately under Documentation/
• all files at any depth under Documentation/technical/
Also, in cone mode, even if no directories are specified, then the
files in the toplevel directory will be included.
When changing the sparse-checkout patterns in cone mode, Git will
inspect each tracked directory that is not within the
sparse-checkout cone to see if it contains any untracked files. If
all of those files are ignored due to the .gitignore patterns,
then the directory will be deleted. If any of the untracked files
within that directory is not ignored, then no deletions will occur
within that directory and a warning message will appear. If these
files are important, then reset your sparse-checkout definition so
they are included, use git add and git commit to store them, then
remove any remaining files manually to ensure Git can behave
optimally.
See also the "Internals — Cone Pattern Set" section to learn how
the directories are transformed under the hood into a subset of
the Full Pattern Set of sparse-checkout.
The full pattern set allows for arbitrary pattern matches and
complicated inclusion/exclusion rules. These can result in O(N*M)
pattern matches when updating the index, where N is the number of
patterns and M is the number of paths in the index. To combat this
performance issue, a more restricted pattern set is allowed when
core.sparseCheckoutCone is enabled.
The sparse-checkout file uses the same syntax as .gitignore files;
see gitignore(5) for details. Here, though, the patterns are
usually being used to select which files to include rather than
which files to exclude. (However, it can get a bit confusing since
gitignore-style patterns have negations defined by patterns which
begin with a !, so you can also select files to not include.)
For example, to select everything, and then to remove the file
unwanted (so that every file will appear in your working tree
except the file named unwanted):
git sparse-checkout set --no-cone '/*' '!unwanted'
These patterns are just placed into the
$GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout as-is, so the contents of that file
at this point would be
/*
!unwanted
See also the "Sparse Checkout" section of git-read-tree(1) to
learn more about the gitignore-style patterns used in sparse
checkouts.
In cone mode, only directories are accepted, but they are
translated into the same gitignore-style patterns used in the full
pattern set. We refer to the particular patterns used in those
mode as being of one of two types:
1. Recursive: All paths inside a directory are included.
2. Parent: All files immediately inside a directory are included.
Since cone mode always includes files at the toplevel, when
running git sparse-checkout set with no directories specified, the
toplevel directory is added as a parent pattern. At this point,
the sparse-checkout file contains the following patterns:
/*
!/*/
This says "include everything immediately under the toplevel
directory, but nothing at any level below that."
When in cone mode, the git sparse-checkout set subcommand takes a
list of directories. The command git sparse-checkout set A/B/C
sets the directory A/B/C as a recursive pattern, the directories A
and A/B are added as parent patterns. The resulting
sparse-checkout file is now
/*
!/*/
/A/
!/A/*/
/A/B/
!/A/B/*/
/A/B/C/
Here, order matters, so the negative patterns are overridden by
the positive patterns that appear lower in the file.
Unless core.sparseCheckoutCone is explicitly set to false, Git
will parse the sparse-checkout file expecting patterns of these
types. Git will warn if the patterns do not match. If the patterns
do match the expected format, then Git will use faster hash-based
algorithms to compute inclusion in the sparse-checkout. If they do
not match, git will behave as though core.sparseCheckoutCone was
false, regardless of its setting.
In the cone mode case, despite the fact that full patterns are
written to the $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout file, the git
sparse-checkout list subcommand will list the directories that
define the recursive patterns. For the example sparse-checkout
file above, the output is as follows:
$ git sparse-checkout list
A/B/C
If core.ignoreCase=true, then the pattern-matching algorithm will
use a case-insensitive check. This corrects for case mismatched
filenames in the git sparse-checkout set command to reflect the
expected cone in the working directory.
If your repository contains one or more submodules, then
submodules are populated based on interactions with the git
submodule command. Specifically, git submodule init -- <path> will
ensure the submodule at <path> is present, while git submodule
deinit [-f] -- <path> will remove the files for the submodule at
<path> (including any untracked files, uncommitted changes, and
unpushed history). Similar to how sparse-checkout removes files
from the working tree but still leaves entries in the index,
deinitialized submodules are removed from the working directory
but still have an entry in the index.
Since submodules may have unpushed changes or untracked files,
removing them could result in data loss. Thus, changing sparse
inclusion/exclusion rules will not cause an already checked out
submodule to be removed from the working copy. Said another way,
just as checkout will not cause submodules to be automatically
removed or initialized even when switching between branches that
remove or add submodules, using sparse-checkout to reduce or
expand the scope of "interesting" files will not cause submodules
to be automatically deinitialized or initialized either.
Further, the above facts mean that there are multiple reasons that
"tracked" files might not be present in the working copy: sparsity
pattern application from sparse-checkout, and submodule
initialization state. Thus, commands like git grep that work on
tracked files in the working copy may return results that are
limited by either or both of these restrictions.
git-read-tree(1) gitignore(5)
Part of the git(1) suite
This page is part of the git (Git distributed version control
system) project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨http://git-scm.com/⟩. If you have a bug report for this manual
page, see ⟨http://git-scm.com/community⟩. This page was obtained
from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/git/git.git⟩ on 2025-08-11. (At that time,
the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
repository was 2025-08-07.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
Git 2.51.0.rc1 2025-08-07 GIT-SPARSE-CHECKOUT(1)
Pages that refer to this page: git(1), git-add(1), git-clone(1), git-config(1), git-read-tree(1), git-rm(1), git-update-index(1), scalar(1)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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