Download only *.Rmd files from a github repository using R or Rmd

Question

I would like to download all of the *.Rmd files in a github repository.

For a simple example, say I wanted to use R or an Rmd file to download all of the *.Rmd files in this repo:

https://github.com/maelle/rmd-blogging-course

I tried using a bash chunk in my Rmd file and wget , but wasn't able to get the Rmd files:

#\```{bash}
wget -r -k --accept *.Rmd https://github.com/maelle/rmd-blogging-course
#\```

I've seen this previous question on how to download an entire repo, but I'm after only the files of a certain extension.

How to download entire repository from Github using R?

Answer 1

You should use Git to clone the repository, or if you only need one revision, you can download a tarball or a zip file, the latter of which you can access from the button that says “Code”. As far as just downloading the *.Rmd files, GitHub doesn't provide a way to recursively download a large amount of files without cloning or downloading a tarball or zip file.

While there are raw file endpoints, they won't work with wget --recursive because there are no directories. Trying to do so anyway would likely cause you to get rate-limited and possibly flagged, since those endpoints aren't intended for bulk download. A tarball or zip file will also likely be much faster as well.