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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T06:42:41+00:00

There was a good link here about how the zip/tarball string is created When

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There was a good link here about how the zip/tarball string is created

When I download a zip from github, what is the hex string at the end of the file name represent?

But I’m looking at the GitHub APIv3 and I was curious if I’m missing something.

  1. Is there a way to get the zip/tarball link via an API call?

  2. If not, is there a way I can build that string without using the git binary or library? Meaning, can I use various API calls to pull out th data a need and assemble to URL I need?

I know the second question is a little unreasonable for stackoverflow and this is a bit of a fun project for me, so I would prefer on the second question if you just kind of nudged me in the right direction as opposed to throwing down a code snippet. Or just told me if it was possible.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can wget your way out of the GitHub repo to get a tar file (archive):

    wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/User/repo/archive/master.tar.gz

# better, if the certificate authorities are present:
wget https://github.com/User/repo/archive/master.tar.gz

    will get you a file named ‘master’ from the user ‘User”s repo ‘repo’.

    The updated V3 API url is:

    https://api.github.com/repos/User/repo/:archive_format/:ref
#
# two possibilities for fomat:
https://api.github.com/repos/User/repo/tarball/master
https://api.github.com/repos/User/repo/zipball/master

# from github example:
$curl -L https://api.github.com/repos/octokit/octokit.rb/tarball > octokit.tar.gz

    You can then tar xpvf master, getting the full archive. It will create a directory following the naming convention described in the question you mentioned.

    No Git binary is needed to get an archive from GitHub, thanks to their download service "Nodeload".

    ligemer proposed in an edit the following example:

    Edit 2016-08-25 – Shell Example With Wget, Variables, and Untar:

    #!/bin/bash -ex

# arguments:
# token = $1
# organization = $2
# repo name = $3
# branch = $4

wget --header="Authorization: token ${1}" --header="Accept:application/vnd.github.v3.raw" -O - https://api.github.com/repos/${2}/${3}/tarball/${4} | tar xz

    Call via:

    $ scriptName.sh token my-organization site.example master

    The command above will download and extract the GitHub folder to the same directory as the script.

    Diogo Quintela suggests in the comments:

    The following example allow the download, extract and cut the top level directory

    curl -L https://api.github.com/repos/octokit/octokit.rb/tarball | tar xz --strip=1
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