Download single files from GitHub

Question

What are some tips on downloading a single file from a GitHub repo?

I don't want the URL for displaying the raw file; in the case of binaries, there's nothing.

http://support.github.com/discussions/feature-requests/41-download-single-file

Is it even possible to use GitHub as a "download server"?

If we decide to switch to Google Code, is the mentioned functionality presented there?

Or is there any free-of-charge hosting and VCS for open-source projects?

Tactful

For GitLab, see https://mcmap.net/q/13554/-how-to-tag-a-single-file-or-how-do-i-download-a-specific-file-git. – Baier

Here's the simplest command-line answer for sure! unix.stackexchange.com/questions/228412/…. Use wget full_url_to_raw_file_on_github. – Saddletree

Download file using the new GIthub Code Preview file download option, here is the demo https://mcmap.net/q/13274/-download-single-files-from-github – Rubbish

Answer 1

Git does not support downloading parts of the repository. You have to download all of it. But you should be able to do this with GitHub.

When you view a file it has a link to the "raw" version. The URL is constructed like so

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/user/repository/branch/filename

By filling in the blanks in the URL, you can use Wget or cURL (with the -L option, see below) or whatever to download a single file. Again, you won't get any of the nice version control features used by Git by doing this.

Update: I noticed you mention this doesn't work for binary files. You probably shouldn't use binary files in your Git repository, but GitHub has a download section for each repository that you can use to upload files. If you need more than one binary, you can use a .zip file. The URL to download an uploaded file is:

https://github.com/downloads/user/repository/filename

Note that the URLs given above, from the links on github.com, will redirect to raw.githubusercontent.com. You should not directly use the URL given by this HTTP 302 redirect because, per RFC 2616: "Since the redirection might be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests."

Disembroil

You can actually download only parts of a repository (in terms of history) using --depth. However, it will break further synchronization with the initial repository (since it effectively re-builds a different history). – Cornel

Note for posterity: I just tested it and using raw works fine for binary files. – Batfowl

tried for a ~10 MB zip file got error: Error: blob is too big – Gaskins

@Gaskins I've been able to get this to work for slightly smaller than 10 MB compressed binaries. GitHub has made it clear on their disk quota page and their downloads tab deprecated blog post that they want to version/store binaries as minimally as possible. – Mohammedanism

The suggested URL format doesn't work for me. I find that https://raw.github.com/user/repository/branch/filename works. – Pitchfork

@BrianC.: (At least as of 27 August 2013) the URL format mentioned in the answer (raw after the repository name) is now automatically redirected to the format you mention (hostname raw.github.com). When in doubt, browse to the file in question on github.com and click on the 'Raw' button. – Flyaway

if you still want to use curl, follow the redirection using the -L option on the command line: curl -L -O github.com/user/repository/raw/branch/filename – Cleptomania

I tried this, but the link opens the file in a new browser window. How can I force download the file? – Bleat

Example: When you want to download latest .htaccess for Drupal 7, go to its Github.com page, copy the link https://github.com/drupal/drupal/blob/7.x/.htaccess and change it to https://raw.githubusercontent.com/drupal/drupal/7.x/.htaccess (change domain, subdomain and remove blob). – Schaaff

@Disembroil this https://raw.githubusercontent.com/downloads/al2helal/ThesisWork/master/consecutive7pointUp36.output 404:file not found. Actual file is here – Zillah

githubenterprise.xyz.com/raw/user/repo/master/File1 Worked for me. – Kaph

I'll add this answer for those who want to do this using postman. 1-go to the Github URL of the file which you wanna download,2-click on raw,3-copy the URL, 4- paste it in postman and make a get request to it, 5- feel free to change the type to text/XML/JSON after making a get request ,6 -click on save the response and save it with your desirable file extension. – Pottle

Answer 2

1. Go to the file you want to download.
2. Click it to view the contents within the GitHub UI.
3. In the top right, right click the Raw button.
4. Save as...

Prowess

Instead of "Save as", copy the URL. Thats the URL of the file. You can now download it with any tool that use the URL to download: wget, your browser, etc. – Barstow

@MattParkins I just tried it and I think it DOES work now for large files (even binary file with the "we can't show files that are this big right now" warning) – Jordanson

This worked fo a single C# file. Perhaps github should add another button for downloading. Right clicking a button is not very intuitive. – Caplan

Perfect for most source code files as they rarely exceed the size threshold. – Hellbender

Just a reminder. Copy the URL of the raw file, i.e. after clicking the Raw option. – Rafael

"Save as" -- that's what I was looking for – Midbrain

Does not work if you don't have a desktop environment. – Samsun

@Samsun It actually does. The "raw" link is probably under the three dots "menu" button. Long press that link and you'll have a "download" option. – Prowess

Answer 3

You can use the V3 API to get a raw file like this (you'll need an OAuth token):

curl -H 'Authorization: token INSERTACCESSTOKENHERE' -H 'Accept: 
application/vnd.github.v3.raw' -O -L 
https://api.github.com/repos/*owner*/*repo*/contents/*path*

All of this has to go on one line. The -O option saves the file in the current directory. You can use -o filename to specify a different filename.

To get the OAuth token, follow these instructions.

I've written this up as a gist as well.

Watermark

This one is good, but unfortunately it only supports files up to 1 MiB in size. – Incommodity

If executing this within a program, be sure User-Agent is set. – Adjudge

Can you give some examples of the path. If you repo is my-repo and the file you want to get is at x/y/z.txt then the URL would be... It was hard to figure out that /owner/repo/ should be filled in by me. Thanks. – Sealy

This works fine but there is a drawback. You don't always the latest version of a file. Try to make a modification to a file, don't wait too much and try to retrieve the file using this method. You will get just the previous version instead. – Sooth

Answer 4

According to this gist, you can use wget or cURL:

1. Click the file name in a GitHub repo.
2. Click Raw to display the file contents.
3. Copy the URL in your browser.

4. In the command line, run either:

   • wget --no-check-certificate --content-disposition https://URL-from-step3/
   • curl -LJO https://URL-from-step3/

   One more: in RHEL7.6, run the following:

   • wget https://URL-from-step3/ --output-document=FILE_NAME

Deprecatory

Answer 5

You can use curl this way:

curl -OL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/<username>/<repo-name>/<branch-name>/path/to/file

O means that curl downloads the content
L means that curl follows the redirection

To

Answer 6

This is now possible in GitHub for any file. You need to translate your files for raw.github.com. For example, if your file is in your repository at:

https://github.com/<username>/<repo>/some_directory/file.rb

Using wget you can grab the raw file from:

https://raw.github.com/<username>/<repo>/<branch>/some_directory/file.rb

Rails Composer is a great example of this.

Lumbye

Some files are hosted on raw.githubusercontent.com – Caterina

and some times it's raw2.github.com just fyi – Hennebery

Answer 7

GitHub Mate makes single file download effortless, just click the icon to download, currently it only work on Chrome.

Imprisonment

@Caterina Checked just now, works for me. Can you make sure you are using the latest version? or let me know the error. Glad to help you to make it work. – Imprisonment

I am on the newest version of Chrome, 34.0.1847.116, and this surely does not work. What operating system are you using? Im on OS X Mavericks. – Character

I tested on Chrome 34 in Windows 7 and OS X Mavericks, both work. quite strange if not work huh? Please aware that folder are not downloadable. Maybe you can try on a different machine. – Imprisonment

ok, that method will only work if you have chrome extension. chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/github-mate/… – Coffman

From this view, simply right-click and save as the file – Marconigraph

THERE IS NO LINK ON ICON THEN HOW TO DOWNLOAD? – Weatherbeaten

Answer 8

There are a variety of ways to handle this, depending on how large the file is, whether or not you need to download folders in addition to files, and if you plan to do this manually or programmatically.

There are six options summarized below. And for those that prefer a more hands-on explanation, I've put together a YouTube video: Download Individual Files and Folders from GitHub.

Also, I've posted a similar answer on StackOverflow for those that need to download single folders/directories from GitHub (as opposed to files).

---

1. GitHub User Interface

• There's a download button on most images.
• There's a download button on the repository's homepage. Of course, this downloads the entire repo, after which you would need to unzip the download and then manually drag out the specific files you need.

2. Browser Context Menu

• Go to the file on GitHub, right click on the "Raw" button to open the browser's context menu. From there, if you're using Google Chrome, select "Save Link As...". Other browser's will have a similar UI, but the selection description may vary. For example, it will be listed as "Download Linked File" and "Download Linked File As" on Safari.

3. Third Party Tools

• There are a variety of browser extensions and web apps that can handle this, with DownGit being one of them. Simply paste in the GitHub URL to the file and press the "Download" button. Note that the link should be the GitHub.com hosted repository view, as opposed to the direct file link. File link example: https://github.com/babel/babel-eslint/blob/master/lib/parse.js.

4. Subversion

• GitHub does not support git-archive (the git feature that would allow us to download specific files). GitHub does however, support a variety of Subversion features, one of which we can use for this purpose. Subversion is a version control system (an alternative to git). You'll need Subversion installed. Grab the GitHub URL for the file you want to download. You'll need to modify this URL, though. You want the link to the repository, followed by the word "trunk", and ending with the path to the nested file. In other words, using the same file link that I mentioned above, we would replace "blob/master" with "trunk". Finally, open up a terminal, navigate to the directory that you want the content to get downloaded to, type in the following command (replacing the URL with the URL you constructed): svn export https://github.com/babel/babel-eslint/trunk/lib/parse.js, and press enter.

5. cURL

• You'll need cURL installed. Go to the file on GitHub.com, left click on the "Raw" button to get to the direct file link, copy this URL, open a terminal, navigate to the directory that you want the content to get downloaded to, type in the following command, replacing the filename with whatever you want to name it, and replacing the URL with the one you just copied: curl -o parse.js https://raw.githubusercontent.com/babel/babel-eslint/master/lib/parse.js.

6. GitHub API

• This is actually what DownGit is using under the hood. Using GitHub's REST API, make a GET request to the content endpoint. The endpoint can be constructed as follows: https://api.github.com/repos/:owner/:repo/contents/:path. After replacing the placeholders, an example endpoint is: https://api.github.com/repos/babel/babel-eslint/contents/lib/parse.js. This gives you JSON data for that file, including a download URL (the same download URL that we used in the cURL example above). This method isn't all that useful for a single file, though (you'd be more likely to use it for downloading a specific folder, as detailed in the answer that I linked to above).

Alisaalisan

its my understanding that download buttons do not download the entire repo...i could be wrong. here's an example: github.com/googleapis/google-api-php-client if you download the repository, you won't get the examples directory; you have to change branches to do that. – Fitzhugh

@Fitzhugh Good catch. That's actually because they specifically excluded specific folders/files in the .gitattributes file: github.com/googleapis/google-api-php-client/blob/master/… – Alisaalisan

In the cURL example, -o parse.js can be replaced with -O to write the file with the same name as the remote file. – Gittle

Answer 9

There is a chrome extension called Enhanced Github

It will add a download button directly to the right of each file.

Leeuwenhoek

This is better than Github Mate solely because it doesn't ask for "Read all your browsing history" permission! Remember to right click on download button > Save link as. – Hectorhecuba

It is necessary to add token from your GitHub's account. – Impolite

this's secure to use? – Seriocomic

@Ariansaputra I've been using it for a long time now, never came across any issues. It should be safe. I don't see why it wouldn't be – Leeuwenhoek

Answer 10

In 2021 GitHub added a new feature of opening visual studio code right on the web. You can launch it by just pressing full stop aka period key ., when you are in any repository.

So for downloading any specific file you can launch the vscode by pressing . key then it will display all files of the repository in vscode there you can download any file you want by right click > dowload.

Timehonored

Answer 11

To follow up with what thomasfuchs said but instead for GitHub Enterprise users here's what you can use.

curl -H 'Authorization: token INSERTACCESSTOKENHERE' -H 'Accept: application/vnd.github.v3.raw' -O -L https://your_domain/api/v3/repos/owner/repo/contents/path

Also here's the API documentation https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/contents

Beni

Can you give some examples of the path. If you repo is my-repo and the file you want to get is at x/y/z.txt then the URL would be... Thanks – Sealy

@Sealy https://your_domain/api/v3/repos/{owner}/my-repo/contents/x/y/z.txt – Helicograph

if I want to download a file from a branch? how can I do it? – Shirline

@CarlosAndres use the ref parameter developer.github.com/v3/repos/contents/#parameters-1 – Beni

Answer 12

In case you want to download a zip file from github using wget

wget -O filename.zip https://github.com/downloads/user/repository/filename.zip?raw=true

see this website for more details

Anticipate

You can download any file, not just .zip. – Autolithography

Answer 13

1. On github, open the file you want to download
2. Locate the "Raw" button adjacent to the "Blame" button
3. Press "Alt" on your keyboard and left-click on your mouse at the same time
4. The file will download automatically in a ".txt" format (it did for me)
5. Change the ".txt" extension to ".csv" extension manually

This worked for me and I hope it does for you too.

Salesperson

Answer 14

1. Copy page link simply
2. In command line type: wget -L (exact copied link)
3. Just replace blob to raw in step 2
4. Enter

Anchorite

I'm getting "zsh: command not found: wget" – Scamander

@BrendanMetcalfe Is because you don't have package wget. Install first – Pomerania

Answer 15

This method works for Windows as I have never used MAC so I don't know what are the alternate keys in MAC for the keys which I'm going to mention below.

Let's talk about the CSV files. IF you want to download the CSV file:

1. Go to that particular dataset that you want to download and click on it.
2. You will see "Raw" button on the top right side of the dataset.
3. Press "Alt" and then left click the "Raw" button.
4. The whole CSV will download in your system.

Remeber, you have to press Alt and left click simultaneously. Just clicking the "Raw" button will open up the CSV in the browser.

I hope that helps.

Delk

Best answer. Least number of steps. Nothing to install. – Mastrianni

Answer 16

You should just do it with the raw URL of your file.

For example to download the README of AFNetworking:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AFNetworking/AFNetworking/master/README.md > ADREADME.md 

As it is a public repo you don't need any credentials. Please note the kind of url: raw.githubusercontent.com/path/to/file

Sabelle

This code doesn't seem to be R or terminal. Where would one use this code? – Desuetude

It's actually a terminal command based on curl and the output redirection with > – Sabelle

Answer 17

GitHub Releases feature

Rather than link to download a specific file within the repo, you should use GitHub's Releases feature to associate downloadable data (such as compiled binaries) with the tagged version of the source code used to generate that data.

https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software

We're excited to announce Releases, a workflow for shipping software to end users. Releases are first-class objects with changelogs and binary assets that present a full project history beyond Git artifacts.

Releases are accompanied by release notes and links to download the software or source code.

Following the conventions of many Git projects, releases are tied to Git tags. You can use an existing tag, or let releases create the tag when it's published.

Reta

Yes! This is the simplest solution, doable right from your browser! 1. From your repository main page, select releases 2. Click on the commit number. 3. Find the file you want, click on the three dots ... and select View file 4. Click on View raw to download the file!!! – Marabou

Answer 18

Simply use wget with raw=True parameter

wget "https://github.com/user/repository/blob/master/directory/file_name?raw=True" -O target_path/file_name

Sordid

Answer 19

To download a file from a Github repo, use the 'curl' command with the link to the raw file.

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/user/repo/filename --output filename

Add the --output option followed by the new filename to download the raw file to the newly created file.

Analog

Answer 20

This would definitely work. At least in Chrome. Right click on the "Raw" icon -> Save Link As.

Agglutinate

This saves the HTML file of the github page, which includes the github wrapper around the file. – Hornsby

@Gregor - FYI, It shouldn't, at least for pages that are TEXT. If in doubt, LEFT-click on the "Raw" icon. This should open the text file in browser, WITHOUT any HTML. Now rt-click anywhere on page, and do "Save As...". (Or do Select-All / Copy, then Paste wherever you want) – Dissident

Answer 21

1. The page you linked to answers the first question.

2. GitHub also has a download facility for things like releases.

3. Google Code does not have Git at all.

4. GitHub, Google Code and SourceForge, just to start, are free hosting. SourceForge might still do CVS.

Revolting

Answer 22

On a Mac or Linux install jq and use it to extract the file from Github like this:

curl -H 'Authorization: token <ACCESS_TOKEN>' \
   -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+raw" -L \
   https://api.github.com/repos/MY-ORG/MY-REPO/contents/MY-FILE-PATH | \
   jq -r '.content' | base64 --decode > MY_FILE_NAME.txt

Documentation for the above command can be found here.

Sines

Answer 23

I think the new url structure is raw.giturl for example:

git file

raw

Launderette

Sometimes the raw url is like this instead (raw.githubusercontent.com): raw.githubusercontent.com/warpech/jquery-handsontable/master/… – Caterina

Answer 24

If you happen to use curl and firefox... you could use the cliget add-on which generates a curl call including all authentication mechanisms (aka cookies).

So right click on the raw button cliget->"copy url for link" and then paste that into a shell. You will get your file even if you had to log-in to see it.

Geter

Answer 25

I recently found a service called gitzip and its also open source:

site - http://kinolien.github.io/gitzip/

repo - https://github.com/KinoLien/gitzip

Vist the above site, enter the repo or directory URL, you can download individual files or whole directory as a zip file.

Emilemile

But how do I only download jszip.min.js from that repository? troll face – Thirdrate

open the file in github and then go to raw. You should see then the source code of the file and then you can download it useing the browser with right click mouse and save as. It works for me. – Sidman

Answer 26

Now it's possible to download any file or any particular folder within the repository using this google chrome extention:

GitZip for github : link : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gitzip-for-github/ffabmkklhbepgcgfonabamgnfafbdlkn

Usage :

1. In any GitHub public repos page.
2. Just double click on the items you need.
3. Click download button at bottom-right.
4. See the progress dashboard and wait for browser trigger download.
5. Get the ZIP file.

Chloroprene

Answer 27

Go to the script and click "Raw"

Then copy the link and download it with the aria2c link.

Eg: aria2c https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kodamail/gscript/master/color.gsf

Trick: the file I wanted to download is, https://github.com/kodamail/gscript*/blob*/master/color.gsf

just modify the link into https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kodamail/gscript/master/color.gsf

Remove the italic texts and add bold texts in the same format, it will give you the right link.

which can be used with aria2c,wget or with curl, I used aria2c here.

Presnell

Answer 28

My simple way to do it is:

1. click the 'Raw' button to get the file contents of github_csv.csv shown on the browser.
2. Then create file.csv and open it in a text editor like notepad
3. Then copy the file content from the website and paste it on the file.csv
4. Your file.csv is github_csv.csv

Sedition

Answer 29

I. If you wanner download a file like a .so other than source code, try click Download button as below:

The file will download tru your browser.

II. If u want to download source code, click Raw and will go to the raw.. page,

Simple copy/paste or use curl or wget command to get it in your terminal.

Amazonas

Answer 30

1. On the right hand side just below "Clone in Desktop" it say's "Download Zip file"
2. Download Zip File
3. Extract the file

Boughpot

Is there any way to do this in such a way that you have the lfs file contents? – Nutshell

Answer 31

For users with GitHub Enterprise you need to construct URL in following scheme

Invoke-WebRequest http://github.mycompany.com/api/v3/repos/my-org/my-repo/contents/myfiles/file.txt -Headers @{"Authorization"="token 8d795936d2c1b2806587719b9b6456bd16549ad8"}

Details can be found here

http://artisticcheese.blogspot.com/2017/04/how-to-download-individual-files-from.html

Helicograph

Answer 32

I used the following format, and I feel it's important to inform about the path.

https://github.com/user/repository/raw/branch/filename

^^^the above is not very complete in my mind

https://github.com/<user>/<repoROOTname>/blob/master/<path>/<filename>?raw=true

some said raw.github.com or raw instead of blob, but the 2nd line works for me and I hope will help others...

2¢

Nazarius

Answer 33

You can try github-files-fetcher, it is a command line tool which downloads a single folder or file from a GitHub repo.

Think a real scenario: you were visiting the following webpage page and wanna download the async subdirectory alone.

https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/tree/master/examples

sorry for not being allowed to post images.

With The github-files-fetcher, you should first copy the url of that page, which is https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/tree/master/examples/async, and then run the command below in command line:

fetcher --url=https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/tree/master/examples/async

Barsac

Answer 34

If you use npm, just run following command line and finally, it won't download any npm package except for this github file

npx config-pack https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/main/README.md

See config-pack for more details

Beaded

Answer 35

Use the pattern f'{host}/{user}/{repo}/{branch}/{file}'. To have a concrete example, do in Python:

import pandas as pd
host = 'raw.github.com'
user = 'fivethirtyeight'
repo = 'data'
branch = 'master'
file = 'births/US_births_2000-2014_SSA.csv'
url = f'https://{host}/{user}/{repo}/{branch}/{file}'
df = pd.read_csv(url,sep=',',header=0)
df.head()

Falkirk

Answer 36

Short answer if you need to download a raw file and wget and curl are not working especially if you are working on a linux terminal:

git clone the whole repo:

git clone https://github.com/sample-repo

change directory to the cloned repo

cd sample-repo

move the raw file to the desired directory (many times this could be the parent of sample repo and change directory

mv raw path/to/desired/dir && cd path/to/desired/dir

OR

mv raw .. && cd ..

Remove the github repo using 'force'

rm -rf sample-repo

Iams

Answer 37

New Github Code Search

The new code preview feature on github allows to download a file directly without any extension or workaround. Note: This feature still in beta so beta access is required.

Enroll in beta features:

• Enroll yourself in beta list wishlist to use the new code search navigation

• Once it's enabled then open the file and click on download raw file

Info: Previously, it was under beta features but now it has been moved to separate beta Wishlist.

Alternately, Use online search portal

1. Visit Github search with search as code and auto_entroll: https://github.com/search?type=code&auto_enroll=true
2. Search your repo (e.g. user:pavneet-sing room repo) and open file
3. Click on download raw file

]

Rubbish