git - GitHub Api download zip or tarball link

Question

There was a good link here about how the zip/tarball string is created

When I download a zip from github, what is the hex string at the end of the file name represent?

But I'm looking at the GitHub APIv3 and I was curious if I'm missing something.

1. Is there a way to get the zip/tarball link via an API call?

2. If not, is there a way I can build that string without using the git binary or library? Meaning, can I use various API calls to pull out th data a need and assemble to URL I need?

I know the second question is a little unreasonable for stackoverflow and this is a bit of a fun project for me, so I would prefer on the second question if you just kind of nudged me in the right direction as opposed to throwing down a code snippet. Or just told me if it was possible.

Answer 1

You can wget your way out of the GitHub repo to get a tar file (archive):

wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/User/repo/archive/master.tar.gz

# better, if the certificate authorities are present:
wget https://github.com/User/repo/archive/master.tar.gz

will get you a file named 'master' from the user 'User''s repo 'repo'.

The updated V3 API url is:

https://api.github.com/repos/User/repo/:archive_format/:ref
#
# two possibilities for fomat:
https://api.github.com/repos/User/repo/tarball/master
https://api.github.com/repos/User/repo/zipball/master

# from github example:
$curl -L https://api.github.com/repos/octokit/octokit.rb/tarball > octokit.tar.gz

You can then tar xpvf master, getting the full archive. It will create a directory following the naming convention described in the question you mentioned.

No git binary is needed to get an archive from GitHub, thanks to their download service "Nodeload".

---

ligemer proposed in an edit the following example:

Edit 2016-08-25 - Shell Example With Wget, Variables, and Untar:

#!/bin/bash -ex

# arguments:
# token = $1
# organization = $2
# repo name = $3
# branch = $4

wget --header="Authorization: token ${1}" --header="Accept:application/vnd.github.v3.raw" -O - https://api.github.com/repos/${2}/${3}/tarball/${4} | tar xz

Call via:

$ scriptName.sh token my-organization site.com master

The command above will download and extract the Github folder to the same directory as the script.

---

Diogo Quintela suggests in the comments:

The following example allow the download, extract and cut the top level directory

curl -L https://api.github.com/repos/octokit/octokit.rb/tarball | tar xz --strip=1