Downloading code

Download a repository archive as a stream or get an authenticated clone URL.

There are two ways to get repository contents: repos.downloadArchive streams a zip or tar.gz archive at a ref, or you clone an authenticated remote. For cloning, repos.getCloneUrl returns a URL with the credential embedded — treat it as a secret and never log it — while repos.getCloneCredentials returns that credential next to a credential-free URL.

Downloading an archive

repos.downloadArchive resolves a ref to a snapshot and returns an Archive whose stream is a Web-standard ReadableStream<Uint8Array>:

const archive = await client.repos.downloadArchive({
  repo: 'capawesome-team/repo-sdk',
  ref: 'v1.0.0',
  format: 'zip',
});
// archive: { stream: ReadableStream<Uint8Array>, contentType?: string, filename?: string }

Because it’s a stream, you can pipe it straight to disk without buffering the whole archive in memory:

import { createWriteStream } from 'node:fs';
import { Writable } from 'node:stream';

const archive = await client.repos.downloadArchive({
  repo: 'capawesome-team/repo-sdk',
  ref: 'v1.0.0',
  format: 'tar.gz',
});

const file = createWriteStream(archive.filename ?? 'archive.tar.gz');
await archive.stream.pipeTo(Writable.toWeb(file));

For the per-provider format rules and when buffering beats streaming, see downloading repository archives programmatically.

Getting a clone URL

repos.getCloneUrl returns a CloneUrl you can hand to git clone:

const clone = await client.repos.getCloneUrl({ repo: 'capawesome-team/repo-sdk' });
// clone: { url, expiresAt? }

Expiring credentials

expiresAt is set when the embedded token has a lifetime — most notably GitHub App installation tokens (~1 hour). Re-fetch the clone URL once it’s past expiresAt rather than caching it indefinitely.

Azure DevOps with Entra auth

Both an OAuth accessToken and an Entra ID tokenProvider embed the token in the URL with the oauth2 username (https://oauth2:<token>@dev.azure.com/...). Entra tokens are short-lived (typically ~1 hour) and the URL carries no expiresAt, so fetch the clone URL just before cloning rather than storing it.

Getting clone credentials

repos.getCloneCredentials returns the same credential split from the URL, so you can feed it to a git credential helper instead of persisting a tokenized remote in .git/config:

const { url, username, password } = await client.repos.getCloneCredentials({
  repo: 'capawesome-team/repo-sdk',
});
// url: 'https://github.com/capawesome-team/repo-sdk.git'

username and password are raw values — percent-encode them yourself if you put them back into a URL. getCloneUrl is exactly that: these credentials embedded as userinfo.

Two shapes need a branch. Gitea passes the token as the username with no password, so password is null. A git-http remote configured without auth clones anonymously, so both are null.