Awesome fork of degit. Join our discord

tiged — straightforward project scaffolding

Stable diffusion (AI) generated logo

tiged makes copies of git repositories. When you run tiged some-user/some-repo or (for backward compatibility) degit some-user/some-repo, it will find the latest commit on https://github.com/some-user/some-repo and download the associated tar file to ~/.degit/some-user/some-repo/commithash.tar.gz if it doesn't already exist locally. (This is much quicker than using git clone, because you're not downloading the entire git history.)

Installation

npm uninstall -g degit
npm install -g tiged

Usage

Basics

You can use tiged or degit as the command. So no automated scripts break if you swap degit for tiged.

The simplest use of tiged is to download the main branch of a repo from GitHub to the current working directory:

tiged user/repo

# these commands are equivalent
tiged github:user/repo
tiged [email protected]:user/repo
tiged https://github.com/user/repo

Or you can download from GitLab and BitBucket:

# download from GitLab
tiged gitlab:user/repo
tiged [email protected]:user/repo
tiged https://gitlab.com/user/repo

# download from BitBucket
tiged bitbucket:user/repo
tiged [email protected]:user/repo
tiged https://bitbucket.org/user/repo

# download from Sourcehut
tiged git.sr.ht/user/repo
tiged [email protected]:user/repo
tiged https://git.sr.ht/user/repo

# download from Hugging Face
tiged huggingface:user/repo
tiged [email protected]:user/repo
tiged https://huggingface.co/user/repo

Specify a tag, branch or commit

tiged user/repo#dev       # branch
tiged user/repo#v1.2.3    # release tag
tiged user/repo#1234abcd  # commit hash

Create a new folder for the project

If the second argument is omitted, the repo will be cloned to the current directory.

tiged user/repo my-new-project

Disable cache

Normally tiged caches tar.gz of the repo for future use. This is sometimes unwanted (e.g. scroll down for known bug)

tiged --disable-cache user/repo

Specify a subdirectory

To clone a specific subdirectory instead of the entire repo, just add it to the argument:

tiged user/repo/subdirectory

Subgroups (GitLab)

To get a GitLab repo that has a subgroup use the --subgroup option.

tiged --subgroup https://gitlab.com/group-test-repo/subgroup-test-repo/test-repo my-dir
tiged -s https://gitlab.com/group-test-repo/subgroup-test-repo/test-repo my-dir

To get a subdirectory of a repo inside a subgroup, use the --sub-directory option.

tiged --subgroup https://gitlab.com/group-test-repo/subgroup-test-repo/test-repo --sub-directory subdir1 my-dir

HTTPS proxying

If you have an https_proxy environment variable, Tiged will use it.

Private repositories

Private repos can be cloned by specifying --mode=git (the default is tar). In this mode, Tiged will use git under the hood. It's much slower than fetching a tarball, which is why it's not the default.

Note: this clones over SSH, not HTTPS.

See all options

tiged --help

Wait, isn't this just git clone --depth 1?

A few salient differences:

• If you git clone, you get a .git folder that pertains to the project template, rather than your project. You can easily forget to re-init the repository, and end up confusing yourself
• Caching and offline support (if you already have a .tar.gz file for a specific commit, you don't need to fetch it again).
• Less to type (tiged user/repo instead of git clone --depth 1 [email protected]:user/repo)
• Composability via actions
• Future capabilities — interactive mode, friendly onboarding and postinstall scripts

JavaScript API

You can also use tiged inside a Node script:

const tiged = require('tiged');

const emitter = tiged('user/repo', {
	disableCache: true,
	force: true,
	verbose: true
});

emitter.on('info', info => {
	console.log(info.message);
});

emitter.clone('path/to/dest').then(() => {
	console.log('done');
});

Actions

You can manipulate repositories after they have been cloned with actions, specified in a degit.json file that lives at the top level of the working directory. Currently, there are two actions — clone and remove. Additional actions may be added in future.

clone

// degit.json
[
	{
		"action": "clone",
		"src": "user/another-repo"
	}
]

This will clone user/another-repo, preserving the contents of the existing working directory. This allows you to, say, add a new README.md or starter file to a repo that you do not control. The cloned repo can contain its own degit.json actions.

remove

// degit.json
[
	{
		"action": "remove",
		"files": ["LICENSE"]
	}
]

Remove a file at the specified path.

Known bugs and workarounds

• zlib: unexpected end of file: this is solved by using option --disable-cache or clearing the cache folder (rm -rf ~/.degit); more details in #45

Why I forked degit?

• degit was last released over a year ago Feb 5, 2020, and Rich is not answering pull requests or issues there. He is probably very busy with Svelte and we love him for that.Rich has now (April 1, 2021) merged the main branch fix. Regardless currently this fork is still more fully featured and will continue to be developed.
• We want pull requests merged. E.g. like automatically working with main or other default branch (has been merged!).
• Update dependencies.
• Hopefully get multiple active maintainers.

What has been fixed?

• Works with main or any default branch automatically. #243
• --mode=git with private repos now work on Windows #191.
• degit --help now works. Previously it would crash instead of displaying help.md contents. #179
• --mode=git is now faster. #171
• Github Actions CI tests working. Added Github Actions badge and removed old CI badges.
• Added support for privately hosted git repositories (#10)
• GitLab works again. #18
• Subdir works in --mode=git #19
• Subgroups work in GitLab #24
• Hashes work with git mode #34
• Using full async + cjs (no build needed) #41
• Option to not use cache #36

It might be time to move on.

See also

• zel by Vu Tran
• gittar by Luke Edwards

License

MIT.