How can I download a private repository from GitHub having no access to ‘git’ on my local machine?

What I want to do is to download private repository archive from GitHub, extract it, remove archive file and copy some directories that are inside downloaded project.

I tried to use wget but I cannot authorize myself:

wget --header='Authorization: token MY_TOKEN_CREATED_ON_GITHUB' https://github.com/MY_USER/MY_REPO/archive/master.tar.gz -O - | tar xz

I also tried with cURL:

curl -i -H 'Authorization: token MY_TOKEN_CREATED_ON_GITHUB' https://github.com/MY_USER/MY_REPO/archive/master.tar.gz > file.tar.gz | tar xz

Here authorization passes, but I can't extract the file.

How to do that?

Solution 1:

The solution with wget would be something like:

wget --header="Authorization: token <OAUTH-TOKEN>" -O - \
    https://api.github.com/repos/<owner>/<repo>/tarball/<version> | \
    tar xz --strip-components=1 && \
    cp -r <dir1> <dir2> ... <dirn> <destination-dir>/

Notes:

• --strip-components=1 will remove the top-level directory that is contained in the GitHub created arhive,
• make sure you don't put a trailing / at the end of directories that are to be copied with cp (<dir1>, <dir2>, ..., <dirn>) and that the trailing / is present at the end of destination directory (<destination-dir>).