I want to download a .zip with the source of a library hosted on github, but I don't want the master, because every time I download I could be downloading a different version.
This particular library does not have tags, so I can't use that.
So how do I download the source.zip for a specific commit sha?
You can put the sha that you want in the download url:
https://github.com/{username}/{projectname}/archive/{sha}.zip
As a general rule, if you have a url that works, you can replace "master" with the specific sha you want.
On unix:
wget https://github.com/{username}/{projectname}/archive/{sha}.zip
Keep in mind that if this is a private repo then wget will not work unless you pass an OAuth token as well.
Here's more info on that:
Having trouble downloading Git archive tarballs from Private Repo
wget -O to rename the archive ZIP file, when unzipped I get a big ugly SHA1 directory name. Any way to avoid this?
.zip you can also use a more UNIX-friendly .tar.gz which preserves executable flags, symlinks, etc.Old way: When viewing the commit's code, click the button "Browse Code" on the upper right, after that click on "Download ZIP".
In 2025, this is how do it with GitHub's new interface: open the repository's page on GitHub. Click on the green button "Code", and then click "Download ZIP".
This is a an old question, but wanted to mention that if you want just the commit as a patch, and not the whole repo at the time of the commit, you can use:
$ wget http://github.com/username/repo/commit/sha1.patch
# ^^^^^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^
# change change change
The /commit and .patch parts being the important part.
This is particularly useful if you want to merge in a change that was reversed a while back and therefore doesn't exist in the forked repo.
For those who came here looking for a way to download a particular file (or directory), from a particular commit (or branch):
git_user="user-name"
git_project="project-name"
commit_or_branch="sha-id or branch name"
dir_or_file="path/to/dir-or-file"
archive_url="https://github.com/${git_user}/${git_project}/archive/${commit_or_branch}.tar.gz"
wget -O - ${archive_url} | tar xz --strip=1 "${git_project}-${commit_or_branch}/${dir_or_file}"
The advantage of downloading the archive as tar.gz, is that you can directly pipe wget into tar command, so it will extract the gz on the fly.
svn - requires SVN to be installed first, while wget is already available on most platforms. Instead of downvoting, post a useful answer.