How to clone just the contents of a GitHub repository

Don’t laugh. I’m a complete Git noob. I needed to clone a WordPress project locally and repo was just the wp-content directory of the site.

If I cloned this normally, it would install the entire repo to my machine, including the top-level root directory. But what I needed was just the contents of that directory so that I could use it with a standard WordPress installation.

The trick? Well, two approaches will do. The first is to cd into a completely empty /wp-content folder and clone the repo like this:

git clone https://github.com/some/repo.git .

That extra dot at the end. That’s all it takes! But if you find yourself getting a Terminal error that the directory isn’t empty, make sure you check for hidden files, like the classic ol’ DS_Store.

If that approach won’t do, it just takes a couple more steps:

git init
git remote add origin https://github.com/some/repo.git 
git pull origin master

Either of those approaches will clone just the contents of the repo rather than packaging them up into a root directory.