Tarball from repo

Probably the simplest way to achieve this is with git archive. If you really need just the expanded tree you can do something like this. git archive master | tar -x -C /somewhere/else Most of the time that I need to 'export' something from git, I want a compressed archive in any case so I do something like this. git archive master | bzip2 >source-tree.tar.bz2 ZIP archive: git archive --format zip --output /full/path master git help archive for more details, it's quite flexible.