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:
[email protected]: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:
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.
Navigate to the folder you want to download. Let's download /test
from master
branch.
Modify the URL for subversion. Replace tree/master
with trunk
.
https://github.com/lodash/lodash/tree/master/test
➜
https://github.com/lodash/lodash/trunk/test
Download the folder. Go to the command line and grab the folder with SVN.
svn checkout https://github.com/lodash/lodash/trunk/test
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
master
branch, usetrunk
instead. So the full path istrunk/foldername
- If you're interested in
foo
branch, usebranches/foo
instead. The full path looks likebranches/foo/foldername
- Protip: You can use
svn ls
to 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.