GitHub Tarball

This is an example code for downloading GitHub repository .tar.gz archive from the GitHub API (which provides ZIP and TAR archive downloads), decompressing it using Node's native zlib module and parsing the resulting stream entries out.

Configuring

Replace userName and repositoryName in the code prior to running it if you wish to try this on your own repository.

Running

node .

Testing

No tests yet.

Purpose

This repository exists as a mere proof of concept. I wanted to see if I can get from pure Node (no NPM or ESM dependencies) to a fully cloned GitHub repository. There are Git clients build in pure JavaScript (check out Isomorphic-Git), but I wanted to see if it would be possible without using any dependencies at all.

To-Do

Decide how to handle files which do not contain their relative directory

Most files are okay and they come out with paths like repo/file.ext. However, some files, probably files whose full relative path would exceed the 100 bytes available for the file name in Tar, only have their file name and no path stored in the archive. I think the safe and probably expected thing to do here is to take the last known path entry and prepend its path to the file name. A reliable way to detect these files is probably just whether their file name contains a slash?

Fix padding NUL byte detection at the end of the archive

Right now after each entry I check to see if the remaining bytes are all NUL. I don't use a particularly efficient way of doing it either and even if I did this is just plain wasteful. I don't have a better way to detect and throw away the end-of-file padding, so this works for now, but it should be improved.