Re: git download

From: Sean Allred <allred.sean@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 24, 2022, 16:52 UTC
Message-ID: <87zgcgs2ne.fsf@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CACtGy4i7Jv+UyjwKOLsMOQwUO81=o98AA5SNwi+=xUB76ehD_g@mail.gmail.com>

Vasilij Demyanov <qvasic@gmail.com> writes:

> I have a need to get just one file from a repository, it would be
> useful to have a command something like this:
>
> git download repo_url branch_or_commit path/to/file

My immediate thought was git-archive[1], but depending the specifics of your needs/setup, you could use curl/wget for this pretty simply. For example, if you're using GitHub, you can

    curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/master/README.md

to dump the content of the README to standard out. As another example, to get the content of next:builtin/var.c,

    curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/next/builtin/var.c

The general pattern:

    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/<repo>/<branch-or-commit>/<file-path>

GitLab's pattern is similar:

    https://gitlab.com/<repo>/-/raw/<branch-or-commit>/<file-path>

e.g.

    curl https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/git/-/raw/main/README.md

This will be limited to getting a single file at a time. If you want more, you can make more curl requests, but git-archive can give a whole directory or even the entire repo at a specific commit. Since git-archive outputs a tar/zip file, you'll want to combine it with your favorite decompression tool to get your content.

[1]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-archive

-- Sean Allred