How to download a folder from github?

Question

I wished to download the mysite folder from this link: https://github.com/username/repository/master/

Answer 1

You can download a file/folder from github

Simply use: svn export <repo>/trunk/<folder>

Ex: svn export https://github.com/lodash/lodash/trunk/docs

Note: You may first list the contents of the folder in terminal using svn ls <repo>/trunk/folder

(yes, that's svn here. apparently in 2016 you still need svn to simply download some github files)

Answer 2

You can use Github Contents API to get an archive link and tar to retrieve a specified folder.

Command line:

curl https://codeload.github.com/[owner]/[repo]/tar.gz/master | \ tar -xz --strip=2 [repo]-master/[folder_path]

---

For example,
if you want to download examples/with-apollo/ folder from zeit/next.js, you can type this:

curl https://codeload.github.com/zeit/next.js/tar.gz/master | \
  tar -xz --strip=2 next.js-master/examples/with-apollo

Answer 3

Use GitZip online tool. It allows to download a sub-directory of a github repository as a zip file. No git commands needed!

Answer 4

How to download a specific folder from a GitHub repo

Here a proper solution according to this post:

• Create a directory

   mkdir github-project-name 
   cd github-project-name
  

• Set up a git repo

   git init
   git remote add origin <URL-link of the repo>
  

• Configure your git-repo to download only specific directories

   git config core.sparseCheckout true # enable this
  

• Set the folder you like to be downloaded, e.g. you only want to download the doc directory from https://github.com/project-tree/master/doc

   echo "/absolute/path/to/folder" > .git/info/sparse-checkout 
  

  E.g. if you only want to download the doc directory from your master repo https://github.com/project-tree/master/doc, then your command is echo "doc" > .git/info/sparse-checkout.

• Download your repo as usual

   git pull origin master
  

Answer 5

There is a button Download ZIP. If you want to do a sparse checkout there are many solutions on the site. For example here.

Answer 6

VSCode Integration for Github

Anyone like me browsing a github repository and want to download a folder from a repository from the browser, without any third party tools, you might use the vs code extensions of github.

Step 1 Open the directory of the repository which you want to download in your browser.

Step 2 In the url bar replace .com with .dev. For ex: https://github.com/lodash/lodash will become https://github.dev/lodash/lodash.

Step 3 This will open a vs code interface of that git repository. Just right click on the folder which you want to download and then press download in option.

Answer 7

If you want to automate the steps, the suggestions here will work only to an extent.

I came across this tool called fetch and it worked quite fine for me. You can even specify the release. So, it takes a step to download and set it as executable, then fetch the required folder:

curl -sSLfo ./fetch \
https://github.com/gruntwork-io/fetch/releases/download/v0.3.12/fetch_linux_amd64

chmod +x ./fetch

./fetch --repo="https://github.com/foo/bar" --tag="${VERSION}" --source-path="/baz" /tmp/baz

Answer 8

This is probably not the most efficient solution, but I think it's fun! THis downloads all the files in a folder on github just using bash

(I used this to download the files for the postgresql tutorial but haven't tested it elsewhere)

curl "https://github.com/postgres/postgres/tree/master/src/tutorial" > test.html
links=$(cat test.html | grep -o \[^\"\]\*/blob/\[^\"]\*)
echo $links
echo "Now as a list.."
as_list=($links)
for (( i=0; i<${#as_list[@]}; i++ ));do
    download_link=("https://raw.githubusercontent.com${as_list[$i]}")
    echo "completing link: "
    echo "${download_link///blob/""}"
    wget "${download_link///blob/""}"
done

Explanation:

(1)the first line downloads the target folder as an html, and saves it as test.html

(2) the second line extracts all links to files on the page. This works by observing that links to files look like "/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/tutorial/.gitignore" on the html, we can get all those by looking for a 'blob' and getting all text upto the nearest quote " on each side

(3) we turn this into a list

(4)to finish the job, we observe that the url for the raw text version of the file looks slightly different , e.g. for the url "/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/tutorial/.gitignore", the url for the raw text file is "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/postgres/postgres/master/src/tutorial/.gitignore". Hence to process the data we turn "/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/tutorial/.gitignore" into "/postgres/postgres/master/src/tutorial/.gitignore", and finally into "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/postgres/postgres/master/src/tutorial/.gitignore"

P.S. sorry if my bash script is clunky - am a new linux user

Answer 9

Dependency: cURL and 7-Zip.

curl {url for downloading zip file} | 7z a -tzip {project name}-{branch name}/{folder path in that branch}

for example:

curl https://github.com/hnvn/flutter_shimmer/archive/master.zip | 7z a -tzip flutter_shimmer-master/examples

Answer 10

There exists also a nice browser extension which allows to dl files or folders

• Enhanced-github extension for google-chrome browser

• Enhanced-github extension for ms-edge browser

Answer 11

You can use git archive

git archive --remote=ssh://github.com/packageName.git HEAD path/to/my/dir | tar -x

Answer 12

You can download the complete folder under Clone or Download options (Git URL or Download Zip)

1. There is a button of Download Zip

2. By using command you can download the complete folder on your machine but for that you need git on your machine. You can find the Git url uner

   git clone https://github.com/url

Answer 13

You can also just clone the repo, after cloning is done, just pick the folder or vile that you want. To clone:

git clone https://github.com/somegithubuser/somgithubrepo.git

then go to the cloned DIR and find your file or DIR you want to copy.