How to acquire tar.gz file from github R package

Question

I need to acquire a tar.gz version of an R package from github. I'm not sure how that's possible. Downloading the package from Github results in a zip file.

For CRAN packages, I would do the following, using ggplot2 as an example:

download.packages(pkgs = "ggplot2", destdir = "package")

Answer 1

The tar.gz for a Github repo account/reponame, branch branchname can be found at

https://github.com/account/reponame/archive/branchname.tar.gz

Hat tip to jeroen/curl, where this trick is noted as a way to install curl without going through devtools (which uses curl)