In this blog post, we are going to learn how to download repositories and files from GitHub using a Linux terminal. GitHub is a popular platform for software developers, hosting millions of repositories. It’s an essential tool that every developer must get to grips with.
Installing Git
Before we can start downloading from GitHub, we need to ensure Git is installed on our Linux machine. Git is a free and open-source distributed version control system that’s crucial for interacting with GitHub.
To install Git, open your terminal and type the following command:
sudo apt-get install git -y
After execution, Git should be installed on your system. You can verify this by checking the Git version with the following command:
git --version
Downloading a Repository
Once Git is installed, you can easily download (or “clone”) a repository from GitHub. Let’s say we want to download a repository named ‘test-repo’ from a user named ‘test-user’.
The first step is to navigate to the location in your terminal where you want the repository to be downloaded. For example, if you want to download the repository to your Desktop, you would use the following command:
cd ~/Desktop
Now, let’s clone the repository. The command to clone a repository is ‘git clone’ followed by the URL of the repository. The URL of the repository will be in the format ‘https://github.com/[username]/[repository].git’. In our example, the command will be:
git clone https://github.com/test-user/test-repo.git
This command will clone the ‘test-repo’ repository into a new directory on your Desktop.
Conclusion
And that’s it! You have successfully downloaded a repository from GitHub onto your Linux machine. You can now explore the repository’s contents, make changes, and even upload the changes back to GitHub if you so wish.
Remember, Git is a powerful tool with a wide range of features. Downloading repositories is just the beginning – I encourage you to explore more and enhance your Git skills!
