Today I learned that you can neatly pack all of the files in your git repository into a tarball:
git archive --format=tar -o my_repo.tar -v HEAD
The best thing about this is it will automatically honour your .gitignore file, so won't include any files you don't care about.
Other formats
It also works with zip files:
git archive --format=zip -o my_repo.zip -v HEAD
Excluding files
In order to exclude files from the archive, you can specify them in a .gitattributes file. Here's an example that excludes the README.md file from the export:
README.md export-ignore
Including the git repo itself
It doesn't include the git repository itself (the .git directory). If you'd like to include it, you can run:
git archive --format=tar -o my_repo.tar -v HEAD
tar -rf my_repo.tar .git
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