github-downloader
Overview
A tool for downloading a large number of repositories from GitHub.
I wrote this tool as I would like to train an ML model on source code. GitHub doesn't have an easy mechanism to allow users to download a large number of repositories, so I decided to write my own tool to facilitate this.
You might wonder why not just execute a git clone command on the repositories I need.
There are multiple reasons actually:
-
I would like to download the top repositories (by star or fork count), which requires a call to GitHub API.
-
Making a large number of
git clonerequests can potentially cause throttling, hence a retry mechanism is required. -
If the execution breaks midway for any reason, re-executing it will skip the repositories that were already downloaded.
-
For model training, one only needs the source files, so other files, e.g. images, binaries, documentation, etc., need to be cleaned to avoid a considerable unnecessary space waste. This scripts does this automatically on each repository after cloning.
-
Doing a
git cloneclones the entire history by default. Again, this is a huge unnecessary space waste, especially with top repositories which have a large number of contributors and thus the history is likely huge.
Usage
After cloning this repository locally, make sure to install the required npm packages using:
npm installThen, execute the following command to show the help message:
npm run mainFor example, the following will download the top repositories (by number of forks) from each of the programming languages that this tool currently support (check help message for a list):
npm run main -- --repos-dir /home/rafid/WorkspaceData/repos --max-repo-count 1If you execute it, you will see an output likes the following
npm run main -- --repos-dir /home/rafid/WorkspaceData/repos --max-repo-count 10
> github-downloader@0.1.0 main
> ts-node src/main "--repos-dir" "/home/rafid/WorkspaceData/repos" "--max-repo-count" "10"
Cloned repos: [========================================] 100% | 140/140
Failed repos: [----------------------------------------] 0% | 0/140
Done. Please check the log files for any warnings or errors.
License
Luckily, the world doesn't revolve around me. As such, unless there is a strong reason not to, I usually publish my code under The Unlicense, meaning that anyone is free to make use of this code however they like. This repository is no exception. See LICENSE.