// the find
Rich-Harris/degit
Straightforward project scaffolding
degit is a CLI (and small ESM API) for scaffolding a new project from a GitHub repo without dragging along its git history — it grabs a tarball of the current commit instead of doing a full clone. It's for anyone who scaffolds projects from templates regularly and is tired of deleting a .git folder every time.
Tarball-based fetching is genuinely faster than git clone --depth 1 for public repos, and it caches archives locally so repeated scaffolds of the same template are instant and work offline. degit.json gives you composable post-clone actions (renames, replacements, etc.) instead of forcing you into a separate scripting step. The CI setup is unusually thorough for a tool this size — separate integration test suites for public and private repos, a performance benchmark workflow with a committed baseline.json, and a security workflow, which suggests the maintainers actually watch for regressions rather than just merging PRs.
The 'no git binary needed' pitch only holds for public HTTPS sources — private repos and SSH sources silently fall back to shelling out to git, so you can hit a hard dependency you didn't know you had the first time you point it at a private repo. It's a global npm install and a Node 20+ runtime for something that's conceptually a curl-and-untar operation, which is real supply-chain and environment overhead if you're using it from a minimal CI image. The new agent skill (SKILL.md) is a good idea for the current moment but it's a thin wrapper telling an agent how to shell out to the same CLI — it doesn't add any capability beyond what a well-written prompt already covers.