Tarballing without Git metadata

Question

My source tree contains several directories which are using Git source control, and I need to tarball the whole tree excluding any references to the Git metadata or custom log files.

I thought I'd have a go using a combination of find/egrep/xargs/tar, but somehow the tar file contains the .git directories and the *.log files.

This is what I have:

find -type f . | egrep -v '\.git|\.log' | xargs tar rvf ~/app.tar

Can someone explain my misunderstanding here? Why is tar processing the files that find and egrep are filtering?

I'm open to other techniques as well.

Solution 1

You will get a nasty surprise when the number of files increase to more than one xargs command: Then you will first make a tar file of the first files and then overwrite the same tar file with the rest of the files.

GNU tar has the --exclude option which will solve this issue:

tar cvf ~/app.tar --exclude .git --exclude "*.log" .

Solution 2

You can try directly with the tar option --exclude-vcs:

--exclude-vcs:
          Exclude version control system directories

For example:

tar cvfj nameoffile.tar.bz2 directory/ --exclude-vcs

It works with Git.

Solution 3

Try something like this:

git archive --format=tar -o ~/tarball.tar -v HEAD

Add your .log files and everything else you don't want to be packed to your .gitignore file.

Solution 4

To exclude version control system directories:

tar --exclude-vcs

This will exclude svn, git metafiles etc.

Solution 5

[slap] Bah! The parameters to find were in the wrong order! I didn't see the warnings because they whizzed off the screen. This allowed '.' to pass through egrep which caused tar to slurp up everything.

That will teach me for drowning important messages in verbose debug.

This works:

find . -type f | egrep -v '\.git|\.log' | xargs tar cvf ~/app.tar

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