gruntwork-io/fetch — 624★ on GitHub (Go). Download files, folders, and release assets from a specific git commit, branch, or tag of public and private GitHub repos.
Snapshot summary built from the project's own GitHub metadata — there's no written TopGit review yet. The page will update automatically when a full review is published.
WHY NO REVIEW YET
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fetch makes it easy to download files, folders, or release assets from a specific commit, branch, or tag of
a public or private GitHub repo.
Motivation
Gruntwork helps software teams get up and running on AWS with DevOps best practices and
world-class infrastructure in about a day. Sometimes we publish scripts and binaries that clients use in their
infrastructure, and we want an easy way to install a specific version of one of those scripts and binaries. While this
is fairly straightforward to do with public GitHub repos, as you can usually curl or wget a public URL, it's much
trickier to do with private GitHub repos, as you have to make multiple API calls, parse JSON responses, and handle
authentication. Fetch makes it possible to handle all of these cases with a one-liner.
Features
Download from any git reference, such as a specific git tag, branch, or commit SHA.
Download a single file, a subset of files, or all files from the repo.
Download one or more binary assets from a specific release that match a regular expression.
Verify the SHA256 or SHA512 checksum of a binary asset.
Download from public repos, or from private repos by specifying a GitHub Personal Access Token.
Download from GitHub Enterprise.
Download from GitLab (public, private, and self-hosted instances).
When specifying a git tag, you can can specify either exactly the tag you want, or a Tag Constraint Expression to do things like "get the latest non-breaking version" of this repo. Note that fetch assumes git tags are specified according to Semantic Versioning principles.
Quick examples
Download folder /baz from tag 0.1.3 of a GitHub repo and save it to /tmp/baz:
Download the fetch binary from the GitHub Releases tab.
Install via package manager
Note that package managers are third party. The third party fetch packages may not be updated with the latest version, but are often close. Please check your version against the latest available on the releases page. If you want the latest version, the recommended installation option is to download from the releases page.
macOS: You can install fetch using Homebrew: brew install fetch.
Linux: Most Linux users can use Homebrew: brew install fetch.
Usage
Assumptions
fetch assumes that a repo's tags are in the format vX.Y.Z or X.Y.Z to support Semantic Versioning parsing. This allows you to specify a Tag Constraint Expression to do things like "get the latest non-breaking version" of this repo. Note that fetch also allows downloading a specific tag not in SemVer format.
General Usage
fetch [OPTIONS] <local-download-path>
The supported options are:
--repo (Required): The fully qualified URL of the GitHub repo to download from (e.g. https://github.com/foo/bar).
--ref (Optional): The git reference to download. If specified, will override --commit, --branch, and --tag.
--tag (Optional): The git tag to download. Can be a specific tag or a Tag Constraint
Expression.
--branch (Optional): The git branch from which to download; the latest commit in the branch will be used. If
specified, will override --tag.
--commit (Optional): The SHA of a git commit to download. If specified, will override --branch and --tag.
--source-path (Optional): The source path to download from the repo (e.g. --source-path=/folder will download
the /folder path and all files below it). By default, all files are downloaded from the repo unless --source-path
or --release-asset is specified. This option can be specified more than once.
--release-asset (Optional): A regular expression matching release assets--these are binary files uploaded to a GitHub
Release--to download. It only works with the --tag option.
--release-asset-checksum (Optional): The checksum that a release asset should have. Fetch will fail if this value
is non-empty and does not match the checksum computed by Fetch, or if more than 1 assets are matched by the release-asset
regular expression.
--release-asset-checksum-algo (Optional): The algorithm fetch will use to compute a checksum of the release asset.
Supported values are sha256 and sha512.
--github-oauth-token (Optional): A GitHub Personal Access
Token. Required if you're
downloading from private GitHub repos. NOTE: fetch will also look for this token using the GITHUB_OAUTH_TOKEN
environment variable, which we recommend using instead of the command line option to ensure the token doesn't get
saved in bash history.
--github-api-version (Optional): Used when fetching an artifact from a GitHub Enterprise instance.
Defaults to v3. This is ignored when fetching from GitHub.com.
--progress (Optional): Used when fetching a big file and want to see progress on the fetch.
The supported arguments are:
<local-download-path> (Required): The local path where all files should be downloaded (e.g. /tmp).
Run fetch --help to see more information about the flags.
Tag Constraint Expressions
The value of --tag can be expressed using any operators defined in hashicorp/go-version.
Specifically, this includes:
Tag Constraint Pattern
Meaning
1.0.7
Exactly version 1.0.7
=1.0.7
Exactly version 1.0.7
!=1.0.7
The latest version as long as that version is not 1.0.7
>1.0.7
The latest version greater than 1.0.7
<1.0.7
The latest version that's less than 1.0.7
>=1.0.7
The latest version greater than or equal to 1.0.7
<=1.0.7
The latest version that's less than or equal to 1.0.7
~>1.0.7
The latest version that is greater than 1.0.7 and less than 1.1.0
~>1.0
The latest version that is greater than 1.0 and less than 2.0
Examples
Usage Example 1
Download /modules/foo/bar.sh from a GitHub release where the tag is the latest version of 0.1.x but at least 0.1.5, and save it to /tmp/bar:
Download all files from a private GitHub repo using the GitHUb oAuth Token 123. Get the release whose tag is exactly 0.1.5, and save the files to /tmp:
Download the release asset foo.exe from a GitHub release hosted on a GitHub Enterprise instance running at ghe.mycompany.com where the tag is exactly 0.1.5, and save it to /tmp:
--source (Optional): Force source type. Values: github, gitlab, auto (default). Use gitlab for self-hosted GitLab with custom domains.
--gitlab-token (Optional): GitLab Personal Access Token. Also available via GITLAB_TOKEN environment variable.
Release Instructions
To release a new version of fetch, go to the Releases page and "Draft a new release".
On the following page, bump the "Tag version" appropriately, and set the "Release title" to be the same.
In the "Describe this release" section, log the changes of this release, linking back to issues that were addressed.
Click the "Publish release" button. CircleCI will pick this up, generate the assets, and attach them to the release.
License
This code is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE.txt.
TODO
Introduce code verification using something like GPG signatures or published checksums
Explicitly test for exotic repo and org names
Apply stricter parsing for repo-filter command-line arg
The most recent commit recorded on gruntwork-io/fetch was 6 months ago, based on the GitHub push timestamp. The repository has 92 forks — one of the better signals of community interest.
Is gruntwork-io/fetch open source?
Yes — gruntwork-io/fetch ships under the MIT license, which makes its source code freely readable (and, depending on license terms, forkable and reusable). Source: github.com/gruntwork-io/fetch.
What license does gruntwork-io/fetch use?
gruntwork-io/fetch is released under the MIT license. Always verify the LICENSE file directly on GitHub for the authoritative terms — license strings can be edited out of sync with a project's actual stance.
What topics is gruntwork-io/fetch associated with?
GitHub's repository topics for gruntwork-io/fetch: "downloader", "git", "github". TopGit's editorial category is Developer Tools.
Where can I see gruntwork-io/fetch in action?
The project maintains a homepage at https://www.gruntwork.io/. The README tab on this page also usually contains screenshots and a quickstart.
Where do I read more about gruntwork-io/fetch?
This TopGit page is a snapshot — the READ ME tab shows the project's own README content (links stripped, images preserved). The GitHub repository at github.com/gruntwork-io/fetch is the definitive source.
Read full README in the tab above.
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