How to download file from git

How To Download Files From GitHub

If you’ve ever used GitHub before, you know that it’s not immediately clear on how to download files from the platform. It’s one of the more complicated platform, as it isn’t directly meant for direct file sharing, but for development instead. Granted, one of the big things about GitHub is that all of the public repositories are open source, and people are encouraged to contribute — there are private repositories, but these are generally used for development purposes within businesses that don’t want their code seen by the public. GitHub, however, still handles downloading files differently than other places.

So if you’re not entirely sure how you can download files from projects (or entire projects) from GitHub, we’re going to show you how. Let’s get started.

Downloading a File From GitHub

That’s a fairly small codebase, with only a couple of files in it. If you go to Wes Bos’ JavaScript 30 repository on Github, you’ll notice that — since it is a public repository — it can be downloaded the same way.

Downloading GitHub Files Using Commands

Alternatively, you can easily clone a file or repository using a few simple commands on GitHub. For this to work, you’ll need to install the Git tools. We’re going to be installing the same tip calculator from the command line in this demo.

There’s a Better Way to Download Files

While the way we outlined is simple and straightforward, it’s most optimal for simply viewing the code files, not experimenting. If you’re planning on downloading GitHub files to experiment with, the best way would be to “fork” the project. A fork is simply your own copy of a repository.

Forking a repository comes with a number of benefits. It gives you your own copy on your GitHub account that allows you to freely experiment with changes without affecting the original project. For example, you could find a bug in my Tip Calculator or want to add your own features. So, you could “fork” my Tip Calculator, creating a copy on your GitHub account. Here, you could mess around the code and experiment with it without affecting the original project, because this would be your copy or “fork.”

Most commonly, forks are used to either propose changes to someone else’s project, like fixing a bug or adding a feature as we mentioned.

So, how do you fork a public repository? It’s actually quite easy. Before we get started, you need to create a free GitHub account, as you’ll need somewhere to store your fork. You can head to www.github.com and do this right now.

Once you have your account created, you can fork a public repository to your account.

Now, you can change and experiment with the code all you want, and it won’t affect the original project files of the original owner. If you change some code, fix a bug, or add a new feature, you can create something called a “Pull Request,” where that change can be discussed. If the original project owner likes the change — and it works properly — it can be merged into the original codebase as production code.

Closing

As you can see, downloading files and whole projects from GitHub is actually quite easy. In just a couple of minutes, you can have an entire project downloaded onto your computer, or even forked to your own GitHub account. It doesn’t take much to mess around with the code in your fork to see what affects what, and then eventually, you might even be able to create your first pull request! Happy coding!

Download a Single File from GitHub: A Guide

When you clone or pull a Git repository, the entire contents of that repository are downloaded by default. Git does not allow you to download part of a repository. Using GitHub, you can download one file from a Git repository.

In this guide, we talk about how to download a single file from GitHub. We walk through two examples to help you learn how to download files from the web browser and the command line.

Download a Single File from GitHub

GitHub lets you download one file from a repository. This is a useful feature because it means you do not have to clone or retrieve an entire repository to download a particular file.

You cannot retrieve a single file using the git command line, even if your repository is hosted on GitHub. You need to use the GitHub web interface, or a direct URL to a file.

To download an individual file from a repository, first navigate to the file you want to download on the GitHub website. Then, click the “Raw” download button that appears on the top right corner of the file explorer window on your page:

In this example, we are viewing the README.md file in a repository called ck-git. When we click “Raw”, we are directed to a plain-text version of our file.

This takes us to the following URL:

Now that we are viewing a plain-text version of our file, we can save it like we would with any web resource. Press Ctrl-S or Cmd-S for Windows and Mac, respectively, and choose where you want to save the file that you are viewing.

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Download a Single File Using a URL

We do not need the web interface to view the raw version of a file. We can manually write the URL of the file we want to retrieve.

Let’s take another look at the URL that the web interface pointed us to earlier:

This URL follows a standard format:

We can use this format to retrieve any file from our Git archive, such as a HTML file or a markdown file. We could download a file called app.py in a folder called “main” using this URL:

This method works on both plain text and binary files. If you need to download an image, for example, you’ll be able to do so using this approach.

This approach only works for files that are public. If you want to retrieve a file from a private repository, you’ll need to download it directly from the GitHub web interface. This is because the web interface provides an access token that you need to view a private file.

Download a Single File Using Wget

We can download a single file from the command line using the wget command. This is because we can write the URL for the file we want to retrieve.

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Like the last approach, you can only download a single file using wget if that file is public.

All we have to do to download a single file using wget is write a wget command:

Conclusion

You can download an individual file from a GitHub repository from the web interface, by using a URL, or from the command line.

You can only retrieve public files by URL or from the command line. This is because private files are protected by an access token that you can only retrieve by viewing a file from the web interface.

Now you have the knowledge you need to download a single file from GitHub like a pro!

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Gyumeijie/github-files-fetcher

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The default unauthorized API access rate is 60 times per hour, which is usually enough. You can surpass this with authentication, using one of the following three ways:

Default configuration file

The default configuration file is

For example, you can use

/config.json as configuration file.

This is a template for the configuration file:

When the default unauthorized API access rate exceeded, github-files-fetcher will automatically switch to use authentication if provided through one of the ways above.

There are some other good tools that function similarly:

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Download a specific folder or file from a GitHub repo through command line

gruntwork-io/fetch

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fetch makes it easy to download files, folders, or release assets from a specific commit, branch, or tag of a public or private GitHub repo.

Gruntwork helps software teams get up and running on AWS with DevOps best practices and world-class infrastructure in about a day. Sometimes we publish scripts and binaries that clients use in their infrastructure, and we want an easy way to install a specific version of one of those scripts and binaries. While this is fairly straightforward to do with public GitHub repos, as you can usually curl or wget a public URL, it’s much trickier to do with private GitHub repos, as you have to make multiple API calls, parse JSON responses, and handle authentication. Fetch makes it possible to handle all of these cases with a one-liner.

Download folder /baz from tag 0.1.3 of a GitHub repo and save it to /tmp/baz :

Download a release asset matching named foo.exe from release 0.1.5 and save them to /tmp :

Download all release assets matching the regular expression, foo_linux-.* from release 0.1.5 and save them to /tmp :

See more examples in the Examples section.

Download from releases page

Download the fetch binary from the GitHub Releases tab.

Install via package manager

Note that package managers are third party. The third party fetch packages may not be updated with the latest version, but are often close. Please check your version against the latest available on the releases page. If you want the latest version, the recommended installation option is to download from the releases page.

fetch assumes that a repo’s tags are in the format vX.Y.Z or X.Y.Z to support Semantic Versioning parsing. This allows you to specify a Tag Constraint Expression to do things like «get the latest non-breaking version» of this repo. Note that fetch also allows downloading a specific tag not in SemVer format.

The supported options are:

The supported arguments are:

Tag Constraint Expressions

Specifically, this includes:

>1.0.7

>1.0

Usage Example 1

Usage Example 2

Usage Example 3

Usage Example 4

Download all files from the latest commit on the sample-branch branch, and save them to /tmp :

Usage Example 5

Usage Example 6

Usage Example 7

This code is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE.txt.

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Download files, folders, and release assets from a specific git commit, branch, or tag of public and private GitHub repos.