How do I download a tarball from GitHub using cURL?

Question

I am trying to download a tarball from GitHub using cURL, but it does not seem to be redirecting:

$ curl --insecure https://github.com/pinard/Pymacs/tarball/         


        

Answer 1

The modernized way of doing this is:

curl -sL https://github.com/user-or-org/repo/archive/sha1-or-ref.tar.gz | tar xz

Replace user-or-org, repo, and sha1-or-ref accordingly.

If you want a zip file instead of a tarball, specify .zip instead of .tar.gz suffix.

You can also retrieve the archive of a private repo, by specifying -u token:x-oauth-basic option to curl. Replace token with a personal access token.