Fastest way to download a GitHub project

Question

When you are on a project page, you can press the 'Download ZIP' button which is located under the "Clone or Download" drop down:

This allows you to download the most recent version of the code as a zip archive.

If you aren't seeing that button, it is likely because you aren't on the main project page. To get there, click on the left-most tab labeled "<> Code".

You say:

To me if a source repository is available for public it should take less than 10 seconds to have that code in my filesystem.

And of course, if you want to use Git (which GitHub is all about), then what you do to get the code onto your system is called "cloning the repository".

It's a single Git invocation on the command line, and it will give you the code just as seen when you browse the repository on the web (when getting a ZIP archive, you will need to unpack it and so on, it's not always directly browsable). For the repository you mention, you would do:

$ git clone git://github.com/SpringSource/spring-data-graph-examples.git

The git:-type URL is the one from the page you linked to. On my system just now, running the above command took 3.2 seconds. Of course, unlike ZIP, the time to clone a repository will increase when the repository's history grows. There are options for that, but let's keep this simple.

I'm just saying: You sound very frustrated when a large part of the problem is your reluctance to actually use Git.

Updated July 2016

As of July 2016, the Download ZIP button has moved under Clone or download to extreme-right of header under the Code tab:

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If you don't see the button:

• Make sure you've selected <> Code tab from right side navigation menu, or

• Repo may not have a zip prepared. Add /archive/master.zip to the end of the repository URL and to generate a zipfile of the master branch.

  http://github.com/user/repository/

-to-

http://github.com/user/repository/archive/master.zip

to get the master branch source code in a zip file. You can do the same with tags and branch names, by replacing master in the URL above with the name of the branch or tag.

Another faster way of downloading a GitHub project would be to use the clone functionality with the --depth argument as:

git clone --depth=1 [email protected]:organization/your-repo.git

to perform a shallow clone.