Git repo checkout single file

Hi, I am fairly new to chef (and git for that matter), so please forgive me if this question is very basic:

Using SVN as my repository, I can use the svn resource to check out a file when running my recipe on a node. Now, I would like to move over to git (I have a local gitlab server) and I would like to do the same, but it seems I will need to check out the full .git repo in my recipe, even if only one file was updated and I wanted to deploy that only?

Do I have that correct or am I missing something?

Thanks!