So the other day I was presented with the following requirements.

From a git repository retrieve a history tag and it’s commit history to deliver to a client.  No other branches should be presented to the client, nor work committed after the tag.

This actually proved to be a little tricky and I’m certain I’m missing some git wizardry but here’s what I did.

Clone the repository (foo) to work on locally

git clone myname@github:foo

Checkout the tag and create a branch from it.

cd foo 
git checkout mytag_1.0.0 
git checkout -b mytag_1.0.0_snapshot

Remove all other local branches and cleanup the repository

git branch -D master 
git gc

At this point you should have a local repository with a single local branch representing the tag you want and a number of references to remote branches.  This can be verified with

git branch -a

Now clone your local repository again

cd .. 
git clone foo foo_final

The foo_final repository should contain nothing but the branch representing the tag at this point. Zip is up, throw it on a flash drive and deliver as appropriate.

Now I make no claims that this is the best way to do this.  In fact I’m certain there should be a better way but this is what I ended up doing.