How do I download binary files of a GitHub release?

Question

I have a repo with binary files in it that I need.

I can

git checkout tags/thetagoftherelease

which seems to checkout the correct tag, but does not pull down the binary files. How can I pull down the binary files that were added to the release (the green boxes on the release)?

Added picture of binary files in a release.

Answer 1

I've tried for days trying to find the proper answer to this, and finally I figured out how to do this via the curl command. It's a 3-step process.

First, to get a list of the assets for the latest release:

curl -H "Authorization: token YOURGITHUBTOKEN" \
    https://api.github.com/repos/NAME/REPO/releases/latest 

Then in the JSON, look up the url of the asset you want. For example it would look like:

"url": "https://api.github.com/repos/NAME/REPO/releases/assets/1275759"

Then you pass this to another curl command to retrieve the actual URL, which is actually a link to an Amazon S3 file.

curl -H "Authorization: token YOURGITHUBTOKEN" \
     -H "Accept:application/octet-stream" \
     -i https://api.github.com/repos/NAME/REPO/releases/assets/1275759

The URL will be in the "location" field of the HTTP response, and then use curl to get the file like this:

curl "https://github-cloud.s3.amazonaws.com...." -i -o FILENAME

Answer 2

This is a mini script to download an asset knowing its file name (can be easily modified to download other assets:

asseturl=$(curl -H "Authorization: token ${token}" https://api.github.com/repos/${repo}/releases/${releaseid}/assets | jq ".[] | select(.name==\"${filename}\") | .url")
curl -L -H "Authorization: token ${token}" -H "Accept:application/octet-stream" $(echo $asseturl | tr -d '"') > ${filename}

• $token is the access token for github
• $filename is the filename for the asset
• $releaseid is the releaseid where the binary file is stored