# Overview

Sometimes, we are only interested in a single folder from a repository. When we download a single folder, it allows us to work fast and not have to carry the baggage that sometimes comes with downloading the entire repository.

For example, a UI engineer might only want the UI folder from the entire micro-service repo.

## Code example

We'll use one of the public repos for this example. Here is the [link](https://github.com/anjanashankar9/Coding) to it.

mkdir Coding
cd Coding/
git init
git remote add origin -f https://github.com/anjanashankar9/Coding.git
vim .git/info/sparse-checkout
# Add leetcode to the file
git config core.sparseCheckout true
git pull origin master
ls

## Code explanation
- Line 1: We create an empty directory on our machine. 
- Line 3: We go into that directory and initialize Git in this directory. 
- Line 4: We add the remote.
- Lines 5 and 6:  We have the sparse-checkout functionality. The files/folders that we like to checkout should be added to `.git/info/sparse-checkout`.

> **Note**: In the `vim`, press `i` to open the file and write `leetcode` to edit it. To exit the `vim`, press escape and type `:x` to save and exit the file. 

Once we set the config to sparse-checkout, we can do a pull. 


Run the above commands in the terminal below:

We can think of the sparse-checkout file as the reverse of the `.gitignore` file.

This is an extremely handy trick for large repos, especially when we only have to work with a small number of files or folders from it.

How to download a single folder or directory from a GitHub repo

Use sparse-checkout to download specific folders from a GitHub repo, optimizing workflow by avoiding full repo downloads.