githubwiki
Does the wiki that installs with a GitHub repo support directories? Our wiki is cluttered with pages, and we are looking for a way to organize them better.
We tried pulling the repo, creating local directories, and moving things around, but when committed back, the wiki didn't pick up the changes.
Since Git 1.7.9 (released in late January 2012), there is a neat mechanism in Git to avoid having to type your password all the time for HTTP / HTTPS, called credential helpers. (Thanks to dazonic for pointing out this new feature in the comments below.)
With Git 1.7.9 or later, you can just use one of the following credential helpers:
git config --global credential.helper cache
The credential.helper cache value tells Git to keep your password cached in memory for a particular amount of minutes. The default is 15 minutes, you can set a longer timeout with:
git config --global credential.helper "cache --timeout=3600"
Which sets the cache for 1 hour, or:
git config --global credential.helper "cache --timeout=86400"
For 1 day. You can also store your credentials permanently if so desired, see the other answers below.
GitHub's help also suggests that if you're on Mac OS X and used Homebrew to install Git, you can use the native Mac OS X keystore with:
git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain
For Windows, there is a helper called Git Credential Manager for Windows or wincred in msysgit.
git config --global credential.helper wincred # obsolete
With Git for Windows 2.7.3+ (March 2016):
git config --global credential.helper manager
For Linux, you would use (in 2011) gnome-keyring(or other keyring implementation such as KWallet).
Nowadays (2020), that would be (on Linux)
sudo dnf install git-credential-libsecret
git config --global credential.helper /usr/libexec/git-core/git-credential-libsecret
sudo apt-get install libsecret-1-0 libsecret-1-dev
cd /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/credential/libsecret
sudo make
git config --global credential.helper /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/credential/libsecret/git-credential-libsecret
With versions of Git before 1.7.9, this more secure option is not available, and you'll need to change the URL that your origin remote uses to include the password in this fashion:
https://you:password@github.com/you/example.git
... in other words with :password after the username and before the @.
You can set a new URL for your origin remote with:
git config remote.origin.url https://you:password@github.com/you/example.git
Make sure that you use https, and you should be aware that if you do this, your GitHub password will be stored in plaintext in your .git directory, which is obviously undesirable.
An alternative approach is to put your username and password in your ~/.netrc file, although, as with keeping the password in the remote URL, this means that your password will be stored on the disk in plain text and is thus less secure and not recommended. However, if you want to take this approach, add the following line to your ~/.netrc:
machine <hostname> login <username> password <password>
... replacing <hostname> with the server's hostname, and <username> and <password> with your username and password. Also remember to set restrictive file system permissions on that file:
chmod 600 ~/.netrc
Note that on Windows, this file should be called _netrc, and you may need to define the %HOME% environment variable - for more details see:
Update Apr. 2021: there are a few tools created by the community that can do this for you:
Note: if you're trying to download a large number of files, you may need to provide a token to these tools to avoid rate limiting.
Original (manual) approach: Checking out an individual directory is not supported by git natively, but Github can do this via SVN. If you checkout your code with subversion, Github will essentially convert the repo from git to subversion on the backend, then serve up the requested directory.
Here's how you can use this feature to download a specific folder. I'll use the popular javascript library lodash as an example.
Navigate to the folder you want to download. Let's download /test from master branch.
Modify the URL for subversion. Replace tree/master with trunk.
https://github.com/lodash/lodash/tree/master/test ➜
https://github.com/lodash/lodash/trunk/test
Download the folder. Go to the command line and grab the folder with SVN.
svn checkout https://github.com/lodash/lodash/trunk/test
You might not see any activity immediately because Github takes up to 30 seconds to convert larger repositories, so be patient.
Full URL format explanation:
- If you're interested in
masterbranch, usetrunkinstead. So the full path istrunk/foldername- If you're interested in
foobranch, usebranches/fooinstead. The full path looks likebranches/foo/foldername- Protip: You can use
svn lsto see available tags and branches before downloading if you wish
That's all! Github supports more subversion features as well, including support for committing and pushing changes.
Best Answer
I was having the exact same issue and tried variants of what you tried. Nothing stuck. Asked GitHub support about it and received a reply that essentially said "No, but we'll let the developers know that people are interested in this feature."
So the short answer is "No", and the long answer is "No, but maybe in the future."