Browse a git repository at a specific commit

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I commonly use tools like git log together with git show when inspecting past changes in a repository:

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git log
# search for a the commit I'm looking for
git show <my-commit>
# see the diff for the commit

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But I also wanted to not only be able to look at the diff of a specific commit, but to browse the whole repository at that specific commit.

I used to accomplish it the "brute force" way: clone the whole repository in another folder and checkout the commit there:

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git clone <original-repo> /tmp/tmp-repo-clone
cd /tmp-repo-clone
git checkout <my-commit>

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But git itself allows we to specific the directory of the checkout by using the --work-tree global git flag. This is what man git says about it:

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--work-tree=<path>
    Set the path to the working tree. It can be an absolute path or a path relative to the current working
    directory. This can also be controlled by setting the GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable and the
    core.worktree configuration variable (see core.worktree in git-config(1) for a more detailed
    discussion).

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So it allows us to set the desired path of the working tree. So if we want to copy the contents of the current working tree into copy/:

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mkdir copy
git --work-tree=copy/ checkout .

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After that copy/ will contain a replica of the code in HEAD. But to checkout a specific, we need some extra parameters: