Descrypt only some files with git-crypt unlock and not the entire repo

Question

I am performing a sparse checkout on a git dir that uses git-crypt.

A normal git clone followed by a git-crypt unlock works.

Since I am running a sparse checkout, I would also like to perform a partial git-crypt unlock

After running

g sparse-checkout init
g sparse-checkout add <dir1>
g checkout master
g sparse-checkout add <dir2>
g checkout master

NOTE: g sparse checkout <dir1> <dir2 followed by g checkout master does not work as it seems to fetch only <dir2>

I run git-crypt unlock

This however fails miserably since it spits out a ton of errors as in

error: pathspec 'path/to/some/other/encrypted/file/not/included/in/my/sparse/checkout' did not match any file(s) known to git

Any suggestions how to deal with this?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 16 '21 at 09:56

There is no direct solution to this.
Something that can be done about it is using multiple keys from git crypt, a key for each sparse checkout and another key for the overall encryption.
Docs: https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt/blob/master/doc/multiple_keys.md
Alternative solution and source of my information: https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt/issues/155
The best solution is using multiple keys at the moment.

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