Ubuntu – How to download a GitHub repo as .zip using command line

command linegithubwgetzip

I am trying to download a .zip file from GitHub using the command line in Ubuntu. I am using wget command for it on a remote Ubuntu system.

I run wget <link> where <link> is the address bar link of the file which I want to download. It ends with archive.zip?ref=master.

Now, when I am executing the command, it is downloading a file with text/html type and not the .zip file which I want.

Please tell me how to get the link to be given as the parameter of wget. Right now, I am just copying the link address of the button (using right click) and writing that as a wget parameter.

Best Answer

From the comments I saw you actually speak about GitHub.

It won't work like this because:

Downloading a project on GitHub causes the GitHub server to first pack your project as zip and than forwarding you to a temporary link where you get your zip ..

this link will only work for a certain time and than GitHub will delete your zip file from their servers..

So what you get with wget is just the html page which would forward you as soon as your zip file is generated.

As suggested use

git clone http://github.com/<yourRepoLink> <optional local path where to store>

to download the git repo ... If for some reason (e.g. for transfer it to others) you need it explicitly as zip you still could pack it after cloning is finished..

Get the tarballs!

Even though Github doesn't expose this in the site (apparently they did ages ago), they provide tar.gz files of the repositories.

wget -qO - https://github.com/<user>/repo>/archive/master.tar.gz | tar zx --strip-components=1 <repo>-master/<filename>

<user>, <repo>, <filename> are what you'd expect them to be. --strip-components is use to prevent tar from creating a directory named after the repo.

Therefore:

$ wget -O - https://github.com/au-answers/dupe-check/archive/master.tar.gz | tar zx --strip-components=1 dupe-check-master/dupe-check
--2016-04-25 08:28:50--  https://github.com/au-answers/dupe-check/archive/master.tar.gz
Resolving github.com (github.com)... 192.30.252.128
Connecting to github.com (github.com)|192.30.252.128|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: https://codeload.github.com/au-answers/dupe-check/tar.gz/master [following]
--2016-04-25 08:28:51--  https://codeload.github.com/au-answers/dupe-check/tar.gz/master
Resolving codeload.github.com (codeload.github.com)... 192.30.252.160
Connecting to codeload.github.com (codeload.github.com)|192.30.252.160|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 2470 (2.4K) [application/x-gzip]
Saving to: ‘STDOUT’

-                                                           100%[========================================================================================================================================>]   2.41K  --.-KB/s    in 0s      

2016-04-25 08:28:52 (21.5 MB/s) - written to stdout [2470/2470]

$ ll dupe-check 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 muru muru 7.5K Mar  5 21:46 dupe-check

I'm not convinced this is a particularly friendly way. An additional chmod +x is IMO infinitely preferable.

Failed attempts

Get the zips!

You can process substitution on zsh to extract the zips linked on the Github repo page. Github, thankfully, adds extra metadata to zips so that permissions are preserved. unzip on Ubuntu is able to use that to restore permissions. So:

unzip -j =(wget -O - https://github.com/au-answers/dupe-check/archive/master.zip) dupe-check-master/dupe-check

Unfortunately, =() is a zsh thing. It creates a proper file instead of a FIFO. Bash doesn't have an equivalent. <() is always FIFO.

Git single files

You can get a single file from repo using git. However, Github doesn't support this.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to use wget with GET parameter, or redirect web

Ubuntu – Download executable script from GitHub preserving +x permissions

Get the tarballs!

Failed attempts

Get the zips!

Git single files

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