Download files and directories locally from a remote git repository
When updating my personal website, I needed a simple way to copy old blog posts
and their assets from an archived repository to the new working repository. I
didn't care about the version control revisions of these posts (most were never
edited after being created anyways), and I didn't want to have to clone the
entire archived repository and manually mv files/directories around.
Inspired by the Unix philosophy of building simple programs that do one thing
well like cp and ftp, I envisioned a simple CLI interface to copy files and
directories from a remote git repository to one's local filesystem. Since I was
learning Go at the time, the language seemed like a perfect candidate to utilize
for this project.
gitdl REPO SOURCE[…] DEST_DIR
REPO: short GitHub path<owner>/<repo>(e.g.cedricium/gitdl)SOURCE: file(s) and/or director(y|ies) from REPO wanting to downloadDEST_DIR: local destination directory where SOURCE args are copied to
The initial use-case that inspired development of gitdl:
gitdl cedricium/personal-site {posts,public/blog-assets} ~/git/websiteImportant
Requires Go v1.16+ since go mod is used to manage dependencies.
Three ways to approach the problem of downloading remote repository contents locally:
- Using GitHub API to download desired files
- Downloading archive of repository (tarball), unpacking and moving desired files
- Utilizing
advanced
gitoperations to selectively fetch desired files
To keep the API for this program simple initially, some assumptions were made, which might be limitations for some users. Those are listed below but requests or contributions to amend these are welcome (possible changes noted in parenthesis):
- GitHub is the only supported git host (
-h, -hostoption for e.g. BitBucket, GitLab, etc.) - when checking out the git repository, the default branch/HEAD ref is used
(
-b, -branchoption) - public access is required to the repository (auth mechanism, e.g. token, user/password, ssh key)