How can I download only a specific folder or directory from a remote Git repo hosted on GitHub?
Say the example GitHub repo lives here:
git@github.com:foobar/Test.git
Its directory structure:
Test/
foo/
a.py
b.py
bar/
c.py
d.py
I want to download only the foo folder and not clone the whole Test project.
Update Sep. 2016: there are a few tools created by the community that can do this for you:
GitZip (Credits to Kino - upvote his answer right here!)
DownGit (Credits to Minhas Kamal - upvote his answer right here!)
Git doesn\'t support this, but Github does via SVN. If you checkout your code with subversion, Github will essentially convert the repo from git to subversion on the backend, then serve up the requested directory.
Here\'s how you can use this feature to download a specific folder. I\'ll use the popular javascript library lodash as an example.
Get the repo URL. First, copy the URL of the Github repo to your clipboard.
![\"github](\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/7ga2M.png\")
Modify the URL for subversion. I want to download the folder at /docs from the master branch, so I will append trunk/docs. Full URL is now https://github.com/lodash/lodash/trunk/docs. See my note below for a more in-depth explanation of why we must use this URL format.
Download the folder. Go to the command line and grab the folder with SVN.
svn checkout https://github.com/lodash/lodash/trunk/docs
You might not see any activity immediately because Github takes up to 30 seconds to convert larger repositories, so be patient.
Full URL format explanation:
- If you\'re interested in
masterbranch, usetrunkinstead. So the full path istrunk/foldername- If you\'re interested in
foobranch, usebranches/fooinstead. The full path looks likebranches/foo/foldername- Protip: You can use
svn lsto see available tags and branches before downloading if you wish
That\'s all! Github supports more subversion features as well, including support for committing and pushing changes.
Chrome Extension, Firefox Addon
Usage:
Get Token:
http://kinolien.github.io/gitzip by using GitHub API, and JSZip, FileSaver.js libraries.
Step1: Input github url to the field at the top-right.
Step2: Press enter or click download for download zip directly or click search for view the list of sub-folders and files.
Step3: Click \"Download Zip File\" or \"Get File\" button to get files.
In most cases, it works fine, except that the folder contains more than 1,000 files, because of the Github Trees API limitation. (refers to Github API#Contents)
And it also can support private/public repos and upgrade the rate limit, if you have GitHub account and use \"get token\" link in this site.
Now, you can DIRECTLY DOWNLOAD or create DOWNLOAD LINK for any GitHub public directory or file (specially large file) from DownGit! Here is a simple demonstration-
![\"DownGit\"](\"https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/5456665/17822364/940bded8-6678-11e6-9603-b84d75bccec1.gif\")
You may also configure the downloaded file\'s property- detailed usage.
If you have svn, you can use svn export to do this:
svn export https://github.com/foobar/Test.git/trunk/foo
Notice the URL format:
https://github.com//trunk appended at the endBefore you run svn export, it\'s good to first verify the content of the directory with:
svn ls https://github.com/foobar/Test.git/trunk/foo
If you want to download files, not clone the repository with history, you can do this with git-archive.
git-archive makes a compressed zip or tar archive of a git repository. Some things that make it special:
.git/ folder, or any untracked files in the repository it\'s run on.An example of creating an archive of the docs/usage directory from a remote repo you\'re connected to with ssh:
# in terminal
$ git archive --format tar --remote ssh://server.org/path/to/git HEAD docs/usage > /tmp/usage_docs.tgz
More information in this blog post and the git documentation.
GitHub doesn\'t allow git-archive access. ☹️
I\'ve created an open source project, called GitHubFolderDownloader. It lets you to download a single folder of a repository without cloning or downloading the whole repository.
Nothing wrong with other answers but I just thought I\'d share step-by-step instructions for those wandering through this process for the first time.
~ To open Terminal just click spotlight and type terminal then hit enter
BTW - If you are on Windows or some other platform you can find a binary download of subversion (svn) at http://subversion.apache.org
~ If you want to checkout the folder rather than simply download it try using the svn help (tldr: replace export with checkout)
Update
Regarding the comment on resuming an interrupted download/checkout. I would try running svn cleanup followed by svn update. Please search SO for additional options.
You cannot; unlike Subversion, where each subdirectory can be checked out individually, Git operates on a whole-repository basis.
For projects where finer-grained access is necessary, you can use submodules -- each submodule is a separate Git project, and thus can be cloned individually.
It is conceivable that a Git front-end (e.g. GitHub\'s web interface, or gitweb) could choose to provide an interface for you to extract a given folder, but to my knowledge none of them do that (though they do let you download individual files, so if the folder does not contain too many files, that is an option)
Edit - GitHub actually offers access via SVN, which would allow you to do just this (as per comment). See https://github.com/blog/1438-improved-svn-here-to-stay-old-svn-going-away for latest instructions on how to do this
If you truly just want to just \"download\" the folder and not \"clone\" it (for development), the easiest way to simply get a copy of the most recent version of the repository (and therefore a folder/file within it), without needing to clone the whole repo or even install git in the first place, is to download a zip archive (for any repo, fork, branch, commit, etc.) by going to the desired repository/fork/branch/commit on GitHub (e.g. http(s)://github.com/<user>/<repo>/commit/<Sha1> for a copy of the files as they were after a specific commit) and selecting the Downloads button near the upper-right.
This archive format contains none of the git-repo magic, just the tracked files themselves (and perhaps a few .gitignore files if they were tracked, but you can ignore those :p) - that means that if the code changes and you want to stay on top, you\'ll have to manually re-download it, and it also means you won\'t be able to use it as a git repository...
Not sure if that\'s what you\'re looking for in this case (again, \"download\"/view vs \"clone\"/develop), but it can be useful nonetheless...
1.Click on this link http://kinolien.github.io/gitzip/
2.Paste link of Github folder you want to download.
3.Click on search it will shows all files for downloading.
Note:-Using search there is no need to enter token key ;)..keep it simple(y)
Whoever is working on specific folder he needs to clone that particular folder itself , todo so please follow below steps ** --- by using SPARSE CHECKOUT --- **
Step 1: Create a directory.
Step 2: Initialize a Git repository. (git init)
Step 3: Enable Sparse Checkouts. (git config core.sparsecheckout true)
Step 4: Tell Git which directories you want (echo 2015/brand/May( refer to folder you want to work on) >> .git/info/sparse-checkout)
Step 5: Add the remote (git remote add -f origin https://jafartke.com/mkt-imdev/DVM.git)
Final Step 6: Fetch the files (git pull origin master )
Another specific example:
Like I want to download \'iOS Pro Geo\' folder from the url
https://github.com/alokc83/APRESS-Books-Source-Code-/tree/master/%20Pro%20iOS%20Geo
and I can do so via
svn checkout https://github.com/alokc83/APRESS-Books-Source-Code-/trunk/%20Pro%20iOS%20Geo
Note trunk in the path
Edited: (as per Tommie C\'s comment)
Yes, using export instead of checkout would give a clean copy without extra git repository files.
svn export https://github.com/alokc83/APRESS-Books-Source-Code-/trunk/%20Pro%20iOS%20Geo
Edited: If tree/master is not there in url then Fork it and it will be there in Forked url.
It\'s one of the few places where SVN is better than Git.
In the end we\'ve gravitated towards three options:
Just to amplify the answers above, a real example from a real GitHub repository to a local directory would be:
svn ls https://github.com/rdcarp/playing-cards/trunk/PumpkinSoup.PlayingCards.Interfaces
svn export https://github.com/rdcarp/playing-cards/trunk/PumpkinSoup.PlayingCards.Interfaces /temp/SvnExport/Washburn
Sometimes a concrete example helps clarify the substitutions proposed.
There\'s a Python3 pip package called githubdl that can do this*:
export GIT_TOKEN=1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123
pip install githubdl
githubdl -u http://github.com/foobar/test -d foo
The project page is here
* Disclaimer: I wrote this package.
You can do a simple download of the directory tree:
git archive --remote git@github.com:foobar/Test.git HEAD:foo | tar xf -
But if you mean to check it out, and be able to do commits and push them back, no you can\'t do that.
I work with CentOS 7 servers on which I don\'t have root access, nor git, svn, etc (nor want to!) so made a python script to download any github folder: https://github.com/andrrrl/github-folder-downloader
Usage is simple, just copy the relevant part from a github project, let\'s say the project is https://github.com/MaxCDN/php-maxcdn/, and you want a folder where some source files are only, then you need to do something like:
$ python gdownload.py \"/MaxCDN/php-maxcdn/tree/master/src\" /my/target/dir/
(will create target folder if doesn\'t exist)
It requires lxml library, can be installed with easy_install lxml
If you don\'t have root access (like me) you can create a .pydistutils.py file into your $HOME dir with these contents:
[install]
user=1
And easy_install lxml will just work (ref: https://stackoverflow.com/a/33464597/591257).
I use linux so , put this in ~/.bashrc , called even :D $HOME/.bashrc
git-dowloadfolder(){
a=\"$1\"
svn checkout ${a/tree\\/master/trunk}
}
then refresh the shell with
source ~/.bashrc
then use it with git-downloadfolder blablabla :D
If you are comfortable with unix commands, you don\'t need special dependencies or web apps for this. You can download the repo as a tarball and untar only what you need.
Example (woff2 files from a subdirectory in fontawesome):
curl -L https://api.github.com/repos/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/tarball | tar xz --wildcards \"*/web-fonts-with-css/webfonts/*.woff2\" --strip-components=3
*/) to match any directory. Github creates a wrapper directory with the commit ref in the name, so it can\'t be known.--strip-components to be the same as the amount of slashes (/) in the path (previous argument).This will download the whole tarball. Use the SVN method mentioned in the other answers if this has to be avoided or if you want to be nice to the GitHub servers.
Our team wrote a bash script to do this because we didn\'t want to have to install SVN on our bare bones server.
https://github.com/ojbc/docker/blob/master/java8-karaf3/files/git-download.sh
It uses the github API and can be run from the command line like this:
git-download.sh https://api.github.com/repos/ojbc/main/contents/shared/ojb-certs
If you need to do it programatically and you don\'t want to rely on SVN, you can use GitHub API to download all the contents recursively.
For inspiration, here\'s my ruby gist: https://gist.github.com/cvengros/b2a7e82f66519d423b6f
To export a directory from GitHub, replace \"/tree/master/\" in the directory\'s url with \"/trunk/\".
For example, to export the directory from the following URL:
https://github.com/liferay/liferay-plugins/tree/master/portlets/sample-hibernate-portlet
run the following command:
svn export https://github.com/liferay/liferay-plugins/trunk/portlets/sample-hibernate-portlet
I wrote a tool with Node.js just for this. Check it out Download Repo Dir
install with npm i -g dl-repo-dir and command repo will be available globally.
repo download aztack/download-repo-dir lib src/lib/new-name
repo download aztack/download-repo-dir \'\' src/lib/download-repo-dir
export GITLAB_API_PRIVATE_TOKEN=YOUR_TOKEN_HERE
repo download gitlab:mygitlab.com:topgroup/subgroup/repo#v1.0.0 dir src/lib/new-name
and there will be a repo.json file to save all the information.
In a new project, you can initialize the project with exists repo.json using repo init command.
None of the answers helped in my situation. If you are developing for Windows, you likely don\'t have svn. In many situations one can\'t count on users to have Git installed either, or don\'t want to download entire repositories for other reasons. Some of the people that answered this question, such as Willem van Ketwich and aztack, made tools to accomplish this task. However, if the tool isn\'t written for the language you are using, or you don\'t want to install a third party library, these don\'t work.
However, there is a much easier way. GitHub has an API that allows you to download a single file or an entire directory\'s contents using GET requests. You can access a directory using https://api.github.com/repos/:owner/:repo_name/contents/:path that returns a JSON object enumerating all the files in the directory. Included in the enumeration is a link to the raw content of the file, the download_url parameter. The file can then be downloaded using that URL.
It\'s a two step process that requires the ability to make GET requests, but this can be implemented in pretty much any language, on any platform. It can be used to get files or directories.
Use this function, the first argument is the url to the folder, the second is the place the folder will be downloaded to:
function github-dir() {
svn export \"$(sed \'s/tree\\/master/trunk/\' <<< \"$1\")\" \"$2\"
}
If the directoy you want to download is a separated library, it\'s better to create an other git repo, and then to use the git submodule function.
Of course, you have to be the owner of the initial repo you want
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