git clone in a slow connection

It happens more often than not, I am on a slow internet connection and I have to clone a decently-huge git repository. The most common issue is the connection closes and the whole clone is cancelled.

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Cloning into 'large-repository'...
remote: Counting objects: 20248, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (10204/10204), done.
error: RPC failed; curl 18 transfer closed with outstanding read data remaining
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
fatal: early EOF
fatal: index-pack failed

After a lot of trial and errors and a lot of “remote end hung up unexpectedly” I have a way that works for me. The idea is to do a shallow clone first and then update the repository with its history.

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$ git clone http://github.com/large-repository --depth 1
$ cd large-repository
$ git fetch --unshallow

And, that’s all folks

Note : This can be equally useful for large repositories as well. More useful for large repositories in a slow connection :D