Getting a single revision from Git
Shallow clone

You can indeed get a shallow clone out of Git using:

git clone --depth=1 &lt;url&gt;


This will still clone the repo and create a .git folder with the objects, only smaller in size (difference depending on your total file size vs. history size).

Git archive

You can also use git-archive to extract an archive of the repo:


  Creates an archive of the specified format containing the tree structure for the named tree, and writes it out to the standard output. If  is specified it is prepended to the filenames in the archive.


In the examples it shows for instance:


  git archive --format=tar --prefix=git-1.4.0/ v1.4.0 | gzip &gt;git-1.4.0.tar.gz  
  
  
    Create a compressed tarball for v1.4.0 release.
  


Hosted Git, archive API

If you are hosting your repo on GitHub, then you can use their archive API:

https://api.github.com/repos/&lt;username&gt;/&lt;repository&gt;/zipball/&lt;commit_hash&gt;

Bitbucket.org has a same functionality for this:

https://bitbucket.org/&lt;username&gt;/&lt;repository&gt;/get/&lt;branch_name|commit_hash|tag&gt;.zip