A simple command-line tool to download a specific folder from a GitHub repository.

• Download any folder from a public or private GitHub repository.
• Refresh previously downloaded folders to pull the latest changes.
• Parallel downloads for faster performance.
• Respects .env files for GitHub API token authentication.

You can install github-dl directly from crates.io using Cargo:

cargo install github-dl

To download a folder, use the download command with the GitHub folder URL and an output directory.

github-dl download <GITHUB_URL> -o <OUTPUT_DIRECTORY>

Example:

github-dl download "https://github.com/rust-lang/book/tree/main/src/ch01-00-introduction" -o ./rust-book-intro

This will download the contents of the ch01-00-introduction folder into the ./rust-book-intro directory.

The tool creates a hidden .github-dl.json metadata file in the output directory. This allows you to easily refresh the folder's contents later.

To refresh all downloaded folders in the current directory (or a specified base directory), use the refresh command.

# Refresh folders in the current directory
github-dl refresh

# Refresh folders in a specific base directory
github-dl refresh --base-dir /path/to/projects

The refresh command will scan for .github-dl.json files recursively and update the contents of each folder from its original GitHub source.

You can control the number of parallel downloads using the -j or --jobs flag. The default is 5.

github-dl download <URL> -o <OUTPUT> -j 10

For private repositories or to avoid hitting GitHub's API rate limits, you can provide a personal access token.

Create a .env file in the directory where you run the command (or in any parent directory) with the following content:

GITHUB_TOKEN=your_personal_access_token_here

github-dl will automatically detect and use this token for all API requests.

This project is licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0
• MIT license

at your option.