Easily Create (Clean) Compressed Tarballs of Your Git Repository

Ideally, you could refer the whole world --- or at least, the significant portion thereof that want your code --- to your (public mirror) Git repository. But unfortunately, the whole world does not (yet) use Git ("I know it was you Fredo, I know it was you, and it breaks my heart."). Sad. Sooooo sad. But true. So the only recourse is for you to send these tortured souls an archived snapshot of your code via e-mail. I'll pause now to let you finish retching/sobbing/lamenting/venting. ... Back? Anyway, Git has a neat "archive" command that helps you create the required archive, but perhaps it does not have the most friendliest interface in the world. Drop the following script anywhere on your path name it "git-targz" and set its executable bit on. Then invoking "git targz TARBALL-FILEPATH" will create a tar'd and gzip'd bundle of your (repository's) current HEAD. Similar scripts for bzip'ing and plain old zipping can easily be created by varying the final command, and are shown after the tar + gzip script.

git-targz:

#! /bin/bash
 
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
    echo "Usage: git-targz [rev] path"
    echo
    echo "Creates gzipped-compressed tarball archive of the current or specified branch."
    exit 1
fi
 
if [ "$#" == "1" ]
then
    path=$1
    rev="HEAD"
else
    rev=$1
    path=$2
fi
basepath=$(basename $path)
prefix=${basepath%%.*}
 
git archive --format=tar --prefix=$prefix/ $rev | gzip >$path

git-tarbz:

#! /bin/bash
 
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
    echo "Usage: git-tarbz [rev] path"
    echo
    echo "Creates bzipped-compressed tarball archive of the current or specified branch."
    exit 1
fi
 
if [ "$#" == "1" ]
then
    path=$1
    rev="HEAD"
else
    rev=$1
    path=$2
fi
basepath=$(basename $path)
prefix=${basepath%%.*}
 
git archive --format=tar --prefix=$prefix/ $rev | bzip2 >$path

git-zip:

#! /bin/bash
 
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
    echo "Usage: git-zip [rev] path"
    echo
    echo "Creates zip archive of the current or specified branch."
    exit 1
fi
 
if [ "$#" == "1" ]
then
    path=$1
    rev="HEAD"
else
    rev=$1
    path=$2
fi
basepath=$(basename $path)
prefix=${basepath%%.*}
 
git archive --format=zip --prefix=$prefix/ $rev > $path

I will leave the obviously-needed exercise of bundling these three independent scripts into a single one that takes a switch that determines the compression method as an exercise for the reader. Once my scripts get to that level of complexity, I usually transition into Python.