github newbie: clone doesn't seem to have gotten me the right files

Question

I just tried to use git for the first time and got unexpected results.

I ran git clone https://github.com/dato/lesswrong-bundle.git which downloaded the following files to a directory called lesswrong-bundle

• _config.yml
• css
• index.md
• _layouts
• lesswrong-seq_paper.pdf
• lesswrong-seq.pdf

What I expected was this list of files which is rather different. This page lists https://github.com/dato/lesswrong-bundle.git by the "Git Read-Only" button, which is the obvious argument to the git command.

There is a link to a zip file which contains the files I wanted, but what went wrong the first time?

Answer 1

You just clone gh-pages branch

Here is the right command:

   git clone -b master https://github.com/dato/lesswrong-bundle.git

You can read more here.

Answer 2

I tried your command and I've your same issue. Then I switched to master tree with

git checkout master

And I've found your right files. As you can see, the files you've found before belong to the "gh-pages" branch. You have 2 branches in this repo 1) master (the one you needed) 2) gh-pages.