Load .zip file from GitHub in Google Colab

Question

I have a zip file at my GitHub repo. I want to load it into my Google Colab files. I have it's url from where it can be dowloaded like https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rehmatsg/../master/...zip

I used this method to download file into Google Colab

from google.colab import files

url = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/user/.../master/...zip'
files.download(url)

But I get this error

FileNotFoundError                         Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-5-c974a89c0412> in <module>()
      3 from google.colab import files
      4 
----> 5 files.download(url)

/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/google/colab/files.py in download(filename)
    141       raise OSError(msg)
    142     else:
--> 143       raise FileNotFoundError(msg)  # pylint: disable=undefined-variable
    144 
    145   comm_manager = _IPython.get_ipython().kernel.comm_manager

FileNotFoundError: Cannot find file: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/user/.../master/...zip

Files in Google Colab are temporary, so I cannot upload it each time. This is the reason I wanted to host the file in my project's GitHub repo. What would be the correct method to download the file into Google Colab?

Answer 1

Use the "wget" bash command. Just open the Github project and go to the download as zip option (at top right). Then, copy the url and use "wget" command.

!wget https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/archive/refs/heads/master.zip

!unzip /content/master.zip

good luck.