Github download folder as zip

Question

How can I provide visitors of my Github repositories a link to download the builds folder of my repository as zip file? The folder contains a executable, shaders and textures needed by the application.

Of course I could manually build a zip file of that directory and add that to the repository. But that results in redundant files, bigger size and unnecessary work for each commit.

So is there a way to zip and download a specific folder and its content of a git repository on Github? Maybe Github has the ability already?

Answer 1

Update July 2013:

As I mention in "Releasing a build artifact on github", you can define a release and upload binaries attached to that release!

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Original answer (January 2013)

No, you cannot do it with GitHub alone.

And GitHub recently got rid of its upload feature, which would have allowed you to uplad a binary for your user to get (without making your git repo grow in size).

So you need to store said binary in another external (binary) repository (Nexus, or Amazon s3 service, or...)

Answer 2

Provided you rely on a public Continuous Integration server, you may also promote the result of your build as downloadable artifacts.

For instance, JetBrains TeamCity provides such feature and Codebetter.com generously provides a free TeamCity server for .Net/Mono open source projects.