How to download a project subdirectory from GitHub
If you want to download an entire project from GitHub without version control data, you can use the Download ZIP option of the website. Alternatively, you could use command line tools, for example:
curl -L https://github.com/janosgyerik/jquery-upvote/tarball/master > project.tar.gz
What if you want to download only a subdirectory? The website doesn’t have an option for that, at least not yet. Not a problem! Thanks to Subversion support in GitHub, you could use the svn
command line tool to that effect, for example:
svn export https://github.com/janosgyerik/jquery-upvote/trunk/lib jquery-upvote-lib
This creates a directory locally with the content of the specified subdirectory of the project.
Just make sure to construct the URL correctly, using the format:
https://github.com/USER/PROJECT/trunk/PATH DEST
Inspired by the question on #stackoverflow: git export from github remote repository
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Written by Janos Gyerik
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5 Responses
I don't have svn/git and don't plan to install either. I just want the subdirectory. What do I do?
@markjeronimus If I knew how to do it without svn, I would have answered that way... Unfortunately I don't :( So you have to either download the entire repo using GitHub's own download feature, or install svn to use this hack.
Finally I found what i need it really helped Thanks janosgyerik
Can we use this to download code from a particular branch from subdirectory??
For GitHub repos, you can clone any sub-directories of any GitHub repository (at any reference) using https://github.com/HR/github-clone