git archive --remote command using GitPython

Question

How can I use command (git archive --remote) using GitPython? As per the GitPython docs we can use git directly. I am doing something like:

git = repo.git git.archive(remote= 'http://path')

But getting an error "Exception is : Cmd('git') failed due to: exit code(1)"

Is there any sample that I can look at to execute git archive --remote in a python script?

Thanks

Answer 1

This question is quite old, but I came across the same problem, so here's my solution:

import git
import shutil

url = 'ssh://url-to.my/repo.git'
remote_ref = 'master'
tmprepo = 'temprepo'
tarball = 'contents.tar'

try:
    repo = git.Repo.init(tmprepo)
    repo.create_remote('origin', url)
    repo.remote().fetch(remote_ref)

    with open(tarball, 'wb') as f:
        repo.archive(f, f'remotes/origin/{remote_ref}', path=None)
    print('Success')
finally:
    shutil.rmtree(tmprepo)

A few notes:

• This solution creates a temporary repository, fetches the requested remote ref and archives it. Ideally we wouldn't need to have all these extra steps, but I wasn't able to find a better solution. Please suggest improvements!
• Set the path parameter to something meaningful in case you only want to include a subset of the directory
• Because we don't require any history whatsoever, the fetch() call can probably be optimized. The **kwargs taken by the functions may help here (see man git-fetch)