Download a single folder or directory from a GitHub repo

Question

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   git github com 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

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Update Sep  2016  there are a few tools created by the community that can do this for you   GitZip  Credits to Kino - upvote his answer right here   DownGit  Credits to Minhas Kamal - upvote his answer right here     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  use trunk instead  So the full path is trunk foldername If you re interested in foo branch  use branches foo instead  The full path looks like branches 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

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This is how I do it with git v2 25 0 TLDR   requires git  gt   v2 25 x git clone --no-checkout --filter tree 0 https   github com opencv opencv cd opencv git sparse-checkout set data haarcascades   or git sparse-checkout set data haar   Full solution   bare minimum clone of opencv   git clone --no-checkout --filter tree 0 https   github com opencv opencv     Resolving deltas  100   529 529   done     Downloaded only  7 3MB   takes  3 seconds   du   disk usage  -s   summary  -h   human-readable   du -sh opencv 7 3M    opencv     Set target dir   cd opencv   git sparse-checkout set data haarcascades     Updating files  100   17 17   done    Takes  10 seconds  depending on your specs    View downloaded files   du -sh data haarcascades  9 4M    data haarcascades    ls data haarcascades  haarcascade eye xml                      haarcascade frontalface alt2 xml      haarcascade licence plate rus 16stages xml  haarcascade smile xml haarcascade eye tree eyeglasses xml      haarcascade frontalface alt tree xml  haarcascade lowerbody xml                   haarcascade upperbody xml haarcascade frontalcatface xml           haarcascade frontalface default xml   haarcascade profileface xml haarcascade frontalcatface extended xml  haarcascade fullbody xml              haarcascade righteye 2splits xml haarcascade frontalface alt xml          haarcascade lefteye 2splits xml       haarcascade russian plate number xml  References  git-sparse-checkout-blog git-sparse-checkout-docs git-filter-props-docs

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You can use ghget with any URL copied from the address bar  ghget https   github com fivethirtyeight data tree master airline-safety  It s a self-contained portable shell script that doesn t use SVN  which didn t work for me on a big repo   It also doesn t use the API so it doesn t require a token and isn t rate-limited  Disclaimer  I made it

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Two options for this feature  Option 1  GitZip Browser Extension  Chrome Extension  Firefox Addon  Usage   In any GitHub repos page  Just double click on the blank part of the items you need  Click download button at bottom-right  See the progress dashboard and wait for browser trigger download  Get the ZIP file   Get Token   Click GitZip Extension icon on your browser  Click  quot Normal quot  or  quot Private quot  link besides  quot Get Token quot   Authorize GitZip permission on Github auth page  Back to repo page of the beginning  Continue to use    Option 2  Github gh-page  http   kinolien github io gitzip by using GitHub API  and JSZip  FileSaver js libraries   Step1  Input github url to the field at the top-right  Step2  Press enter or click download for download zip directly or click search for view the list of sub-folders and files  Step3  Click  quot Download Zip File quot  or  quot Get File quot  button to get files  In most cases  it works fine  except that the folder contains more than 1 000 files  because of the Github Trees API limitation   refers to Github API Contents  And it also can support private public repos and upgrade the rate limit  if you have GitHub account and use  quot get token quot  link in this site

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Go to DownGit  gt  Enter Your URL  gt  Download  You can DIRECTLY DOWNLOAD or create DOWNLOAD LINK for any GitHub public directory or file from DownGit  Here is a simple demonstration-    You may also configure properties of the downloaded file- detailed usage   Disclaimer  I fell into the same problem as the question-asker and could not find any proper solution  So  I created this tool for my own use first  then opened it for everyone

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For a Generic git Repo   If you want to download files  not clone the repository with history  you can do this with git-archive   git-archive makes a compressed zip or tar archive of a git repository  Some things that make it special    You can choose which files or directories in the git repository to archive  It doesn t archive the  git  folder  or any untracked files in the repository it s run on  You can archive a specific branch  tag  or commit  Projects managed with git often use this to generate archives of versions of the project  beta  release  2 0  etc   for users to download    An example of creating an archive of the docs usage directory from a remote repo you re connected to with ssh     in terminal   git archive --format tar --remote ssh   server org path to git HEAD docs usage  gt   tmp usage docs tar   More information in this blog post and the git documentation   Note on GitHub Repos   GitHub doesn t allow git-archive access

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you can use git svn in the following way   git svn clone https   github com lodash lodash trunk test   This way you don t have to go through the pain of setting svn  specifically for Windows users

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For whatever reason  the svn solution does not work for me  and since I have no need of svn for anything else  it did not make sense to spend time trying to make it  so I looked for a simple solution using tools I already had   This script uses only curl and awk to download all files in a GitHub directory described as    user repo contents  path    The returned body of a call to the GitHub REST API   GET  repos  user repo contents  path  command returns an object that includes a  download url  link for each file in a directory   This command-line script calls that REST API using curl and sends the result through AWK  which filters out all but the  download url  lines  erases quote marks and commas from the links  and then downloads the links using another call to curl   curl -s https   api github com repos  user  repo contents  path   awk          download url    gsub              2   system  curl -O   2

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Another specific example   Like I want to download  iOS Pro Geo  folder from the url  https   github com alokc83 APRESS-Books-Source-Code- tree master  20Pro 20iOS 20Geo  and I can do so via  svn checkout https   github com alokc83 APRESS-Books-Source-Code- trunk  20Pro 20iOS 20Geo   Note trunk in the path  Edited   as per Tommie C s comment   Yes  using export  instead of checkout would give a clean copy without extra git repository files   svn export https   github com alokc83 APRESS-Books-Source-Code- trunk  20Pro 20iOS 20Geo   Edited  If tree master is not there in url then Fork it and it will be there in Forked url

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Whoever is working on specific folder he needs to clone that particular folder itself  to do so please follow below steps by using sparse checkout    Create a directory  Initialize a Git repository   git init  Enable Sparse Checkouts   git config core sparsecheckout true  Tell Git which directories you want  echo 2015 brand May  refer to folder you want to work on      git info sparse-checkout  Add the remote  git remote add -f origin https   jafartke com mkt-imdev DVM git  Fetch the files  git pull origin master

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Just 5 steps to go  Download SVN from here  Open CMD and go to SVN bin directory like  cd  ProgramFiles  SlikSvn bin Let s suppose I wan to download this directory URL https   github com ZeBobo5 Vlc DotNet tree develop src Samples Replace tree develop or tree master with trunk Now fire this last command to download folder in same directory   svn export https   github com ZeBobo5 Vlc DotNet trunk src Samples

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None of the answers helped in my situation  If you are developing for Windows  you likely don t have svn  In many situations one can t count on users to have Git installed either  or don t want to download entire repositories for other reasons  Some of the people that answered this question  such as Willem van Ketwich and aztack  made tools to accomplish this task  However  if the tool isn t written for the language you are using  or you don t want to install a third party library  these don t work   However  there is a much easier way  GitHub has an API that allows you to download a single file or an entire directory s contents using GET requests  You can access a directory using https   api github com repos  owner  repo name contents  path that returns a JSON object enumerating all the files in the directory  Included in the enumeration is a link to the raw content of the file  the download url parameter  The file can then be downloaded using that URL   It s a two step process that requires the ability to make GET requests  but this can be implemented in pretty much any language  on any platform  It can be used to get files or directories

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To export a directory from GitHub  replace   tree master   in the directory s url with   trunk     For example  to export the directory from the following URL   https   github com liferay liferay-plugins tree master portlets sample-hibernate-portlet   run the following command   svn export https   github com liferay liferay-plugins trunk portlets sample-hibernate-portlet

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The easiest way is to use fetcher first  install fetcher with the following command   npm install -g github-files-fetcher  then you can download file or folder with its URL   fetcher --url resource url  --out output directory  for example   fetcher --url  quot https   github com Gyumeijie github-files-fetcher blob master CHANGELOG md quot  --out  tmp

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Open repo to codesandbox by replacing github to githubbox in url and on codesandbox go to file menu and Export it as a zip  For following repo  https   github com geist-org react tree master examples custom-themes Enter following url  https   githubbox com geist-org react tree master examples custom-themes In codesandbox go to file menu and Export it as a Zip

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You can try using the gitzip extension for chrome  its super easy to use and has helped me download many folders before too

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If you truly just want to just  download  the folder and not  clone  it  for development   the easiest way to simply get a copy of the most recent version of the repository  and therefore a folder file within it   without needing to clone the whole repo or even install git in the first place  is to download a zip archive  for any repo  fork  branch  commit  etc   by going to the desired repository fork branch commit on GitHub  e g  http s    github com  lt user gt   lt repo gt  commit  lt Sha1 gt  for a copy of the files as they were after a specific commit  and selecting the Downloads button near the upper-right   This archive format contains none of the git-repo magic  just the tracked files themselves  and perhaps a few  gitignore files if they were tracked  but you can ignore those  p  - that means that if the code changes and you want to stay on top  you ll have to manually re-download it  and it also means you won t be able to use it as a git repository     Not sure if that s what you re looking for in this case  again   download  view vs  clone  develop   but it can be useful nonetheless

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If you have svn  you can use svn export to do this   svn export https   github com foobar Test git trunk foo   Notice the URL format    The base URL is https   github com   trunk appended at the end   Before you run svn export  it s good to first verify the content of the directory with   svn ls https   github com foobar Test git trunk foo

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2019 Summary  There are a variety of ways to handle this  depending on whether or not you want to do this manually or programmatically   There are four options summarized below  And for those that prefer a more hands-on explanation  I ve put together a YouTube video  Download Individual Files and Folders from GitHub   Also  I ve posted a similar answer on StackOverflow for those that need to download single files from GitHub  as opposed to folders      1  GitHub User Interface   There s a download button on the repository s homepage  Of course  this downloads the entire repo  after which you would need to unzip the download and then manually drag out the specific folder you need    2  Third Party Tools   There are a variety of browser extensions and web apps that can handle this  with DownGit being one of them  Simply paste in the GitHub URL to the folder  e g  https   github com babel babel-eslint tree master lib  and press the  Download  button    3  Subversion   GitHub does not support git-archive  the git feature that would allow us to download specific folders   GitHub does however  support a variety of Subversion features  one of which we can use for this purpose  Subversion is a version control system  an alternative to git   You ll need Subversion installed  Grab the GitHub URL for the folder you want to download  You ll need to modify this URL  though  You want the link to the repository  followed by the word  trunk   and ending with the path to the nested folder  In other words  using the same folder link example that I mentioned above  we would replace  tree master  with  trunk   Finally  open up a terminal  navigate to the directory that you want the content to get downloaded to  type in the following command  replacing the URL with the URL you constructed   svn export https   github com babel babel-eslint trunk lib  and press enter    4  GitHub API   This is the solution you ll need if you want to accomplish this task programmatically  And this is actually what DownGit is using under the hood  Using GitHub s REST API  write a script that does a GET request to the content endpoint  The endpoint can be constructed as follows  https   api github com repos  owner  repo contents  path  After replacing the placeholders  an example endpoint is  https   api github com repos babel babel-eslint contents lib  This gives you JSON data for all of the content that exists in that folder  The data has everything you need  including whether or not the content is a folder or file  a download URL if it s a file  and an API endpoint if it s a folder  so that you can get the data for that folder   Using this data  the script can recursively go through all content in the target folder  create folders for nested folders  and download all of the files for each folder  Check out DownGit s code for inspiration

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I use linux so   put this in    bashrc   called even  D  HOME  bashrc  git-dowloadfolder    a   1  svn checkout   a tree  master trunk       then refresh the shell with   source    bashrc    then use it with git-downloadfolder blablabla  D

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If you want to use Python and SVN to download a specific GitHub directory  here is the code that you would use   import validators from svn remote import RemoteClient  def download folder url       if  tree master  in url          url   url replace  tree master    trunk        r   RemoteClient url      r export  output     if   name         main         url   input  Enter folder URL         if not validators url url           print  Invalid url       else          download folder url    You can check more details about this code and other GitHub search and download tips in this tutorial  https   python gotrained com search-github-api

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You can do a simple download of the directory tree   git archive --remote git github com foobar Test git HEAD foo   tar xf -   But if you mean to check it out  and be able to do commits and push them back  no you can t do that

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If the directoy you want to download is a separated library  it s better to create an other git repo  and then to use the git submodule function   Of course  you have to be the owner of the initial repo you want

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Nothing wrong with other answers but I just thought I d share step-by-step instructions for those wandering through this process for the first time   How to download a single folder from a github repository  Mac OS X         To open Terminal just click spotlight and type terminal then hit enter    On a Mac you likely already have SVN  to test just open terminal and type  svn  or  which svn    without the quote marks  On Github  Locate the Github path to your git folder  not the repo  by clicking the specific folder name within a repo Copy the path from the address bar of the browser Open Terminal and type  svn export Next paste in the address  eg    https   github com mingsai Sample-Code tree master HeadsUpUI Replace the words  tree master  with the word  trunk Type in the destination folder for the files  in this example  I store the target folder inside of the Downloads folder for the current user  Here space is just the spacebar not the word  space    Downloads HeadsUpUI The final terminal command shows the full command to download the  folder  compare the address to step 5  svn export  https   github com mingsai Sample-Code trunk HeadsUpUI    Downloads HeadsUpUI   BTW - If you are on Windows or some other platform you can find a binary download of subversion  svn  at http   subversion apache org       If you want to checkout the folder rather than simply download it try using the svn help  tldr  replace export with checkout    Update  Regarding the comment on resuming an interrupted download checkout  I would try running svn cleanup followed by svn update  Please search SO for additional options

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git clone --filter from git 2 19 now works on GitHub Tested 2020-09-18  git 2 25 1  This option was added together with an update to the remote protocol  and it truly prevents objects from being downloaded from the server  E g   to clone only objects required for d1 of this repository  https   github com cirosantilli test-git-partial-clone I can do  git clone     --depth 1     --filter blob none     --no-checkout     https   github com cirosantilli test-git-partial-clone     cd test-git-partial-clone git checkout master -- d1  I have covered this in more detail at  Git  How do I clone a subdirectory only of a Git repository

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If you are comfortable with unix commands  you don t need special dependencies or web apps for this  You can download the repo as a tarball and untar only what you need   Example  woff2 files from a subdirectory in fontawesome    curl -L https   api github com repos FortAwesome Font-Awesome tarball   tar xz --wildcards    web-fonts-with-css webfonts   woff2  --strip-components 3    More about the link format  https   developer github com v3 repos contents  get-archive-link   including how to get a zip file or specific branches refs  Keep the initial part of the path      to match any directory  Github creates a wrapper directory with the commit ref in the name  so it can t be known  You probably want --strip-components to be the same as the amount of slashes     in the path  previous argument     This will download the whole tarball  Use the SVN method mentioned in the other answers if this has to be avoided or if you want to be nice to the GitHub servers

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It s one of the few places where SVN is better than Git   In the end we ve gravitated towards three options    Use wget to grab the data from GitHub  using the raw file view   Have upstream projects publish the required data subset as build artifacts  Give up and use the full checkout  It s big hit on the first build  but unless you get lot of traffic  it s not too much hassle in the following builds

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Our team wrote a bash script to do this because we didn t want to have to install SVN on our bare bones server   https   github com ojbc docker blob master java8-karaf3 files git-download sh  It uses the github API and can be run from the command line like this   git-download sh https   api github com repos ojbc main contents shared ojb-certs

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Just to amplify the answers above  a real example from a real GitHub repository to a local directory would be   svn ls https   github com rdcarp playing-cards trunk PumpkinSoup PlayingCards Interfaces  svn export https   github com rdcarp playing-cards trunk PumpkinSoup PlayingCards Interfaces   temp SvnExport Washburn   Sometimes a concrete example helps clarify the substitutions proposed

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in the directory that you want to donwload   git init git remote add origin -f repoUrl    folder url touch  git info sparse-checkout git pull origin master   only 4 lines of code

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You cannot  unlike Subversion  where each subdirectory can be checked out individually  Git operates on a whole-repository basis   For projects where finer-grained access is necessary  you can use submodules -- each submodule is a separate Git project  and thus can be cloned individually   It is conceivable that a Git front-end  e g  GitHub s web interface  or gitweb  could choose to provide an interface for you to extract a given folder  but to my knowledge none of them do that  though they do let you download individual files  so if the folder does not contain too many files  that is an option   Edit - GitHub actually offers access via SVN  which would allow you to do just this  as per comment   See https   github com blog 1438-improved-svn-here-to-stay-old-svn-going-away for latest instructions on how to do this

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git sparse-checkout     Git 2 25 0 includes a new experimental git sparse-checkout command that makes the existing feature easier to use  along with some important performance benefits for large repositories   The GitHub Blog    Example with current version   git clone --filter blob none --sparse https   github com git git git cd git git sparse-checkout init --cone git sparse-checkout add t   Most notably   --sparse checks out only top-level directory files of git repository into working copy git sparse-checkout add t incrementally adds checks out t subfolder of git    Other elements   git sparse-checkout init does some preparations to enable partial checkouts --filter blob none optimizes data fetching by downloading  only necessary git objects  take a look at partial clone feature for further infos  --cone also speeds up performance by applying more restricted file inclusion patterns     GitHub status     GitHub is still evaluating this feature internally while it   s enabled on a select few repositories        As the feature stabilizes and matures  we   ll keep you updated with its progress   docs

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If you need to do it programatically and you don t want to rely on SVN  you can use GitHub API to download all the contents recursively   For inspiration  here s my ruby gist  https   gist github com cvengros b2a7e82f66519d423b6f

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There s a Python3 pip package called githubdl that can do this    export GIT TOKEN 1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123 pip install githubdl githubdl -u http   github com foobar test -d foo   The project page is here    Disclaimer  I wrote this package

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Use this function  the first argument is the url to the folder  the second is the place the folder will be downloaded to   function github-dir         svn export    sed  s tree  master trunk    lt  lt  lt    1      2

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A straightforward answer to this is to first tortoise svn from following link   https   tortoisesvn net downloads html  while installation turn on CLI option  so that it can be used from command line interface  copy the git hub sub directory link   Example https   github com tensorflow models tree master research deeplab  replace tree master with trunk  https   github com tensorflow models trunk research deeplab  and do  svn checkout https   github com tensorflow models trunk research deeplab  files will be downloaded to the deeplab folder in the current directory

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I work with CentOS 7 servers on which I don t have root access  nor git  svn  etc  nor want to   so made a python script to download any github folder  https   github com andrrrl github-folder-downloader  Usage is simple  just copy the relevant part from a github project  let s say the project is https   github com MaxCDN php-maxcdn   and you want a folder where some source files are only  then you need to do something like       python gdownload py   MaxCDN php-maxcdn tree master src   my target dir   will create target folder if doesn t exist    It requires lxml library  can be installed with easy install lxml If you don t have root access  like me  you can create a  pydistutils py file into your  HOME dir with these contents    install  user 1  And easy install lxml will just work  ref  https   stackoverflow com a 33464597 591257

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To be unique  I must say you can also download Github folders without svn  git  or any api  Github supports RAW link which you can exploit to download only those files and folders which you need  I noticed many things  Below is my research collection  Mechanism  Crawl all hyperlinks  lt a gt  from webpage and get its href  quot value quot  value  if href value contains  quot  tree master  quot  or  quot  tree main  quot  then it is folder link   https   github com graysuit GithubFolderDownloader   tree main   GithubFolderDownloader  else if href value contains  quot  blob master  quot  or  quot  blob main  quot  then it is file link   https   github com graysuit GithubFolderDownloader   blob main   GithubFolderDownloader sln  Afterwards  replace  quot github com quot  with  quot raw githubusercontent com quot  and Remove  quot  blob  quot  from file   https   raw githubusercontent com graysuit GithubFolderDownloader main GithubFolderDownloader sln  It would become RAW link  Now you can download it    Tool On the basis of above research  I created a minimalist tool in C  that can grab folders  graysuit GithubFolderDownloader Note  I am author  You can comment if any thing missing or unclear

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try it  https   github com twfb git-directory-download usage  gitd  -h   -u URL   -r   -p   --proxy PROXY   optional arguments    -h  --help         show this help message and exit   -u URL  --url URL  github url  split by  quot   quot   example   quot https   x  http   y quot    -r  --raw          download from raw url   -p  --parse        download by parsing html   --proxy PROXY      proxy config  example  quot socks5   127 0 0 1 7891 quot   Example    1  download by raw url  gitd -u  quot https   github com twfb git-directory-download quot    2  download by raw url  gitd -r -u  quot https   github com twfb git-directory-download quot    3  dowmload by parsing  gitd -p -u  quot https   github com twfb git-directory-download quot    4  download by raw url with proxy  gitd -r -u  quot https   github com twfb git-directory-download quot  --proxy  quot socks5   127 0 0 1 7891 quot

[git] Download a single folder or directory from a GitHub repo

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