Clone a git repo if it does not exist, or pull into it if it does exist

gistfile1.sh

#!/bin/sh

REPOSRC=$1
LOCALREPO=$2

# We do it this way so that we can abstract if from just git later on
LOCALREPO_VC_DIR=$LOCALREPO/.git

if [ ! -d $LOCALREPO_VC_DIR ]
then
    git clone $REPOSRC $LOCALREPO
else
    cd $LOCALREPO
    git pull $REPOSRC
fi

# End

/dev/null would hide error messages in first clone, so the full if conditional is safer.
Can always use ; to compress shell code into a one-liner... 😉

Could also do the pull unconditionally, mildly less efficient but condenses to:

[ -d $LOCALREPO_VC_DIR ] || git clone $REPOSRC $LOCALREPO
(cd $LOCALREPO; git pull $REPOSRC)

The parens around (cd ...; git pull ...) are not needed when it's a standalone script like here but good in a larger context — cd done in a sub-shell won't affect the rest of the script.

P.S. A futher tweak: testing existance -e $LOCALREPO_VC_DIR rather than requiring it to be a directory -d is slightly more generic for cases when the clone was created by other means — it's possible for .git to be a text file with content gitdir: ..., as set up by git submodule, git worktree and maybe others...

I made this script, a "little bit" more complex but which fulfilled my specific needs: https://gist.github.com/jotaelesalinas/cc88af3c9c4f8664216ea07bd08c250f

git clone "$REPOSRC" "$LOCALREPO" 2> /dev/null || (cd "$LOCALREPO" ; git pull)

Thank you. 👍

No need to cd into the directory to pull from it. git -C "$LOCALREPO" pull