How to download .zip from GitHub for a particular commit sha?

Question

You can put the sha that you want in the download url:

https://github.com/{username}/{projectname}/archive/{sha}.zip

As a general rule, if you have a url that works, you can replace "master" with the specific sha you want.

On unix:

wget https://github.com/{username}/{projectname}/archive/{sha}.zip

Keep in mind that if this is a private repo then wget will not work unless you pass an OAuth token as well.

Here's more info on that:

Having trouble downloading Git archive tarballs from Private Repo

When viewing the commit's code, click the button "Browse Code" on the upper right, after that click on "Download ZIP".

This is a an old question, but wanted to mention that if you want just the commit as a patch, and not the whole repo at the time of the commit, you can use:

$ wget http://github.com/username/repo/commit/sha1.patch
#                        ^^^^^^^^ ^^^^        ^^^^
#                        change   change      change

The /commit and .patch parts being the important part.

This is particularly useful if you want to merge in a change that was reversed a while back and therefore doesn't exist in the forked repo.

For those who came here looking for a way to download a particular file (or directory), from a particular commit (or branch):

git_user="user-name"
git_project="project-name"
commit_or_branch="sha-id or branch name"
dir_or_file="path/to/dir-or-file"

archive_url="https://github.com/${git_user}/${git_project}/archive/${commit_or_branch}.tar.gz"

wget -O - ${archive_url} | tar xz --strip=1 "${git_project}-${commit_or_branch}/${dir_or_file}"

The advantage of downloading the archive as tar.gz, is that you can directly pipe wget into tar command, so it will extract the gz on the fly.