How do I download a tarball from GitHub using cURL?
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/v0.24-beta2
<html><body>You are being <a href="https://nodeload.github.com/pinard/Pymacs/tarball/v0.24-beta2">redirected</a>.</body></html>
Note: wget works for me:
$ wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/pinard/Pymacs/tarball/v0.24-beta2
However I want to use cURL because ultimately I want to untar it inline with something like:
$ curl --insecure https://github.com/pinard/Pymacs/tarball/v0.24-beta2 | tar zx
I found that the URL after redirecting turned out to be https://download.github.com/pinard-Pymacs-v0.24-beta1-0-gcebc80b.tar.gz, but I would like cURL to be smart enough to figure this out.
Use the -L option to follow redirects:
curl -L https://github.com/pinard/Pymacs/tarball/v0.24-beta2 | tar zx
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.
You can also use wget to »untar it inline«. Simply specify stdout as the output file (-O -):
wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/pinard/Pymacs/tarball/v0.24-beta2 -O - | tar xz
All the other solutions require specifying a release/version number which obviously breaks automation.
This solution- currently tested and known to work with Github API v3- however can be used programmatically to grab the LATEST release without specifying any tag or release number and un-TARs the binary to an arbitrary name you specify in switch --one-top-level="pi-ap". Just swap-out user f1linux and repo pi-ap in below example with your own details and Bob's your uncle:
curl -L https://api.github.com/repos/f1linux/pi-ap/tarball | tar xzvf - --one-top-level="pi-ap" --strip-components 1