Retrieve a single file from a repository

What is the most efficient mechanism (in respect to data transferred and disk space used) to get the contents of a single file from a remote git repository?

So far I've managed to come up with:

git clone --no-checkout --depth 1 git@github.com:foo/bar.git && cd bar && git show HEAD:path/to/file.txt

This still seems overkill.

What about getting multiple files from the repo?

In git version 1.7.9.5 this seems to work to export a single file from a remote

git archive --remote=ssh://host/pathto/repo.git HEAD README.md

This will cat the contents of the file README.md.

Following on from Jakub's answer. git archive produces a tar or zip archive, so you need to pipe the output through tar to get the file content:

git archive --remote=git://git.foo.com/project.git HEAD:path/to/directory filename | tar -x

Will save a copy of 'filename' from the HEAD of the remote repository in the current directory.

The :path/to/directory part is optional. If excluded, the fetched file will be saved to <current working dir>/path/to/directory/filename

In addition, if you want to enable use of git archive --remote on Git repositories hosted by git-daemon, you need to enable the daemon.uploadarch config option. See https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-daemon.html

If there is web interface deployed (like gitweb, cgit, Gitorious, ginatra), you can use it to download single file ('raw' or 'plain' view).

If other side enabled it, you can use git archive's '--remote=<URL>' option (and possibly limit it to a directory given file resides in), for example:

$ git archive --remote=git@github.com:foo/bar.git --prefix=path/to/ HEAD:path/to/ |  tar xvf -

Not in general but if you are using Github:

For me wget to the raw url turned out to be the best and easiest way to download one particular file.

Open the file in the browser and click on "Raw" button. Now refresh your browser, copy the url and do a wget or curl on it.

wget example:

wget 'https://github.abc.abc.com/raw/abc/folder1/master/folder2/myfile.py?token=DDDDnkl92Kw8829jhXXoxBaVJIYW-h7zks5Vy9I-wA%3D%3D' -O myfile.py

Curl example:

curl 'https://example.com/raw.txt' > savedFile.txt

To export a single file from a remote:

git archive --remote=ssh://host/pathto/repo.git HEAD README.md | tar -x

This will download the file README.md to your current directory.

If you want the contents of the file exported to STDOUT:

git archive --remote=ssh://host/pathto/repo.git HEAD README.md | tar -xO

You can provide multiple paths at the end of the command.

It looks like a solution to me: http://gitready.com/intermediate/2009/02/27/get-a-file-from-a-specific-revision.html

git show HEAD~4:index.html > local_file

where 4 means four revision from now and ~ is a tilde as mentioned in the comment.

I use this

$ cat ~/.wgetrc
check_certificate = off

$ wget https://raw.github.com/jquery/jquery/master/grunt.js
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 11339 (11K) [text/plain]
Saving to: `grunt.js'

A nuanced variant of some of the answers here that answers the OP's question:

git archive [email protected]:foo/bar.git \
  HEAD path/to/file.txt | tar -xO path/to/file.txt > file.txt

It seems to me the easiest way to use the following:

wget https://github.com/name/folder/file.zip?raw=true

If you repository supports tokens (for example GitLab) then generate a token for your user then navigate to the file you will download and click on RAW output to get the URL. To download the file use:

curl --silent --request GET --header 'PRIVATE-TOKEN: replace_with_your_token' \
'http://git.example.com/foo/bar.sql' --output /tmp/bar.sql

If no other answer worked (i.e. restrictive GitLab access), you can do a "selective-checkout" by:

1. git clone --no-checkout --depth=1 --no-tags URL
2. git restore --staged DIR-OR-FILE
3. git checkout DIR-OR-FILE

Although this solution is 100% git compliant and you can checkout a directory, it's not disk nor network optimal as doing a wget/curl on a file.

I solved in this way:

git archive --remote=ssh://[email protected]/user/mi-repo.git BranchName /path-to-file/file_name | tar -xO /path-to-file/file_name > /path-to-save-the-file/file_name

If you want, you could replace "BranchName" for "HEAD"

For single file, just use wget command.

First, follow the pic below to click "raw" to get the url, otherwise you will download code embedded in html.

Then, the browser will open a new page with url start with https://raw.githubusercontent.com/...

just enter the command in the terminal:

#wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/...

A while the file will put in your folder.

If your Git repository hosted on Azure-DevOps (VSTS) you can retrieve a single file with Rest API.

The format of this API looks like this:

 https://dev.azure.com/{organization}/_apis/git/repositories/{repositoryId}/items?path={pathToFile}&api-version=4.1?download=true

For example:

 https://dev.azure.com/{organization}/_apis/git/repositories/278d5cd2-584d-4b63-824a-2ba458937249/items?scopePath=/MyWebSite/MyWebSite/Views/Home/_Home.cshtml&download=true&api-version=4.1

This is specific for git repos hosted on GitHub

Try the 'api' command of Github's command line app, gh, to make an authenticated call to Github's 'get repository contents' endpoint.

The basic command is:

$gh api /repos/{owner}/{repo}/contents/<path_to_the_file>

As an added bonus, when you do this from inside a directory that contains a clone of the repo you're trying to get the file from, the {owner} and {repo} part will be automatically filled in.

https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/repos#get-repository-content

The response will be a JSON object. If the indeed points to a file, the JSON will include a 'size', 'name', several url fields to access the file, as well as a 'content' field, which is a base64 encoded version of the file contents.

To get the file contents, you can curl the value of the "download_url", or just decode the 'content' field. You can do that by piping the base64 command, like this:

$gh api /repos/{owner}/{repo}/contents/<path-to-the-file> --jq '.content' | base64 -d

Yisrael Dov's answer is the straightforward one, but it doesn't allow compression. You can use --format=zip, but you can't directly unzip that with a pipe command like you can with tar, so you need to save it as a temporary file. Here's a script:

#!/bin/bash

BASENAME=$0

function usage {
    echo "usage: $BASENAME <remote-repo> <file> ..."
    exit 1
}

[ 2 -gt "$#" ] && { usage; }

REPO=$1
shift
FILES=$@

TMPFILE=`mktemp`.zip
git archive -9 --remote=$REPO HEAD $FILES -o $TMPFILE
unzip $TMPFILE
rm $TMPFILE

This works with directories too.

Github Enterprise Solution

HTTPS_DOMAIN=https://git.your-company.com
ORGANISATION=org
REPO_NAME=my-amazing-library
FILE_PATH=path/to/some/file
BRANCH=develop
GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN=<your-access-token>

URL="${HTTPS_DOMAIN}/raw/${ORGANISATION}/${REPO_NAME}/${BRANCH}/${FILE_PATH}"

curl -H "Authorization: token ${GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN}" ${URL} > "${FILE_PATH}"

The following 2 commands worked for me:

git archive --remote={remote_repo_git_url} {branch} {file_to_download} -o {tar_out_file}

Downloads file_to_download as tar archive from branch of remote repository whose url is remote_repo_git_url and stores it in tar_out_file

tar -x -f {tar_out_file}.tar extracts the file_to_download from tar_out_file

I use curl, it works with public repos or those using https basic authentication via a web interface.

curl -L --retry 20 --retry-delay 2 -O https://github.com/ACCOUNT/REPO/raw/master/PATH/TO/FILE/FILE.TXT -u USER:PASSWORD

I've tested it on github and bitbucket, works on both.

If you want to get a file from a specific hash + a remote repository I've tried git-archive and it didn't work.

You would have to use git clone and once the repository is cloned you would have then to use git-archive to make it work.

I post a question about how to do it more simpler in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41152200/git-archive-from-a-specific-hash-from-remote

for bitbucket directly from browser (I used safari...) right-click on 'View Raw" and choose "Download Linked File":

If you don't mind cloning the entire directory, this small bash/zsh function will have the end result of cloning a single file into your current directory (by cloning the repo into a temp directory and removing it afterwards).

Pro: You only get the file you want

Con: You still have to wait for the whole repo to clone

git-single-file () {
        if [ $# -lt 2 ]
        then
                echo "Usage: $0 <repo url> <file path>"
                return
        fi
        TEMP_DIR=$(mktemp -d)
        git clone $1 $TEMP_DIR
        cp $TEMP_DIR/$2 .
        rm -rf $TEMP_DIR
}

If your goal is just to download the file there's a hassle-free application called gget:

gget github.com/gohugoio/hugo 'hugo_extended_*_Linux-ARM.deb'

The above example would download single file from hugo repository.

https://github.com/dpb587/gget

Related to @Steven Penny's answer, I also use wget. Furthermore, to decide which file to send the output to I use -O .

If you are using gitlabs another possibility for the url is:

wget "https://git.labs.your-server/your-repo/raw/master/<path-to-file>" -O <output-file>

Unless you have the certificate or you access from a trusted server for the gitlabs installation you need --no-check-certificate as @Kos said. I prefer that rather than modifying .wgetrc but it depends on your needs.

If it is a big file you might consider using -c option with wget. To be able to continue downloading the file from where you left it if the previous intent failed in the middle.