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Clone Repository

There’s a few ways to clone an Oxen repository, depending on the level of data transfer you want to incur. The default oxen clone with no flags will download the latest commit from the main branch.
To clone from a specific branch, you can use the -b flag.
This creates a new directory CatDogBBox in which the files from the latest commit are downloaded, and a .oxen folder containing the Merkle Tree for each commit in the branch’s history and metadata for the repository.

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Clone all

To clone the commit history for every branch, you can use the --all flag.
This is useful if you want to migrate a repository to a new remote.

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Cloning a subtree

If you’re only working with a subset of the repository, you can use the --filter and --depth flags to limit the clone to a subsection of the full tree. --filter selects the directories to be cloned, while --depth limits how many subdirectories can be recursed into.
This clones the subtree of the commit that starts at annotations directory, without recursing into any new subdirectories. Only the files and merkle tree nodes from the annotations directory will be pulled locally.

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Remote Mode

If you’re working with a larger repository than you can store on your local device, you can clone the repository in Remote Mode to get the commit merkle trees without downloading the files.
In remote-mode repositories, you can download individual files or directories with oxen restore.
This is useful if you want to view the state of the repository locally without waiting for all its files to download.

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Set Remote

If create a repo locally, you can use oxen config --set-remote to point it to a repository that’s hosted remotely. This allows you to fetch or pull from that repository.
To set a remote, use the URL of the remote repository and specify a name to associate it with on the local repo. By default, cloned repositories will use the name ‘origin’ for their remote. You can use this command to change a local repository’s remotes or add new ones. A repo can have multiple remotes, although most oxen commands that interact with a remote repository will default to ‘origin’ if no remote is specified.

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Pull Changes

Once you have a local repo with a remote, you can pull the latest changes for a branch. This fetches any new commits, downloading their files and commit merkle trees, and then checks out the latest commit in the working directory
If no arguments are provided, the remote defaults to origin and branch defaults to main
As with clone, you can pull all branches with --all

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Fetch Changes

If you want to fetch the latest changes without checking them out in the working directory, you can use oxen fetch

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Download Data

If you want to download specific files or directories with the oxen download command.
You can download from a specific revision (either a branch or commit id) with the --revision flag