Can I git clone into a directory without cloning the project name as a directory (using bitbucket)?

Question

I'm a small business and for the most part only use git locally to track history then SFTP the files to the remote server.

I now have a much larger more complicated build that to be set up properly requires a production, a staging, and a development server.

I'm trying to set up git so I can merge changes from development and push/pull to the staging environment for deployment testing, then again to production.

So far, I've installed git on production and development. I've also created a Repo via Bitbucket and commit/pushed the contents of my httpdocs folder to master. I thought this would mean I can simply clone then branch directly into my httpdocs folder on development.

However, when I tried to pull these files into the development environement to make the development branch it included a folder with my project name(I never created this folder). I ended up with httpdocs/MyProjectName/Files

My questions are:

1. Did I do something wrong in setup?
2. Is there a way to configure git so it knows I want the files not the containing directory?
3. Can I clone in a way that only pulls the contents of MyProjectName but not the directory?

I don't want my workflow to include pull then copy to httpdocs.

Solution

git clone [repository] [local path]

If your working directory is your desired destination, simply put a .

$ git clone [email protected] .

Comments

[skarface]

are there files in httpdocs that aren't in your repo?

[rockit]

I initially thought the OP misspelled "gitbucket" - turns out there's an actual project behind it.

[Bms85smb]

@skarface no there aren't

[Bms85smb]

@Isxek I did make a typo. I'm referring to bitbucket.org

[Alf]

Note: the directory you want to clone into, here called [local_path], must be empty

[Bionix1441]

This works for one project level, how about if I have two folders I want to skip?

[dhudson]

@Bionix1441 - stackoverflow.com/questions/14326365/…

[Bionix1441]

Thank you, the sparsecheckout would not work for me, since I am using maven plugin for Jenkins, and I only specify the URL of the repository to clone. May be the easiest solution is to remove the second wrapping folder.