Does GitHub Enterprise support shallow cloning?

Question

There have been some discussions around whether GitHub Enterprise supports shallow clones or not, e.g. here or here. A shallow Git clone is created by running something like this:

git clone --depth 1 https://server/user/repo.git

Apparently, GitHub Enterprise does not return from this command, it stalls indefinitely.

Is this an official bug on GitHub Enterprise? If so, can someone point me to a reference for this bug? Has there been an official statement from GitHub on this?

Are there versions of GitHub Enterprise that support shallow cloning without stalling?

You should probably contact GitHub support to confirm this. But technically, it should support it just fine. — poke, Apr 02 '15 at 06:22
Yes, I've sent an email to them - let's hear what they say. I do hope they respond. — nwinkler, Apr 02 '15 at 06:26
If you hear anything back, please self-answer the question so future readers will have a definite answer too :) — poke, Apr 02 '15 at 06:31

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

I received an answer from GitHub Support:

I can confirm that there was a limitation in the older GitHub Enterprise 11.10.xxx releases where it was not possible to shallow clone and attempts to do so would hang indefinitely. This has now been fixed in our newest releases starting from GitHub Enterprise 2.0.0. The fix for this will not be backported to older releases so customers will need to ensure they're running GitHub Enterprise 2.0.0 or later to get this functionality.

A bit of background on our version numbers is probably needed here. 11.10.xxx were our old versions where the version number was based on the version of Ubuntu on which they were built, in this case Ubuntu 11.10 (aka Oneiric Ocelot). GitHub Enterprise 2.0 is a major and significant change so we decided to switch to the more sane and familiar semantic versioning scheme with this release.

Does GitHub Enterprise support shallow cloning?

1 Answers1