How to download a project subdirectory from GitHub —29 December 2013

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. Luckily, 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