Cloning is a popular theme in science fiction movies and literature. Just to mention Star Wars and Attack of the Clones. But it’s not science fiction at all – in the real world probably everyone has heard of Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal. Since then, mankind has managed to clone, among others horse, pig, or dog. Wait, we are interested in the IT world, right? The world of over 87.2% programmers using the Git version control system, 60M GitHub users, 10M Bitbucket teams, and over 30M GitLab enthusiasts – so let’s focus on a very in-depth look at the git clone command topic. Do we have your attention?
What Is a Git Clone?
To work with Git, we need to have a copy of the repo on our device. In an event of failure and the lack of backups, we can restore the entire repository on the basis of such a copy. So what is a clone? This is a complete copy of the repository with an entire history of changes. But a clone is also the name of a specific function in Git that allows us to do this.