R: How to download single file from specific branch of private GitHub repo?-CodePudding

How to download single file from specific branch of GitHub private repo using R?

It can be easily done for default branch, e.g.:

require(httr)

github_path = "https://api.github.com/repos/{user}/{repo}/contents/{path_to}/{file}"
github_pat = Sys.getenv("GITHUB_PAT"))

req <- content(GET(github_path,
                   add_headers(Authorization = paste("token", github_pat))), as = "parsed")

tmp <- tempfile()
r1 <- GET(req$download_url, write_disk(tmp))

...but I can't figure out how to do that for specific branch. Tried to include branch name in github_path but it didn't work (Error in handle_url(handle, url, ...)).

Since it is easy with classic curl, e.g.:

curl -s -O https://{PAT}@raw.githubusercontent.com/{user}/{repo}/{branch}/{path_to}/{file}

...I tried to do it like:

tmp <- tempfile()
curl::curl_download("https://{PAT}@raw.githubusercontent.com/{user}/{repo}/{branch}/{path_to}/{file}", tmp)

But it didn't work as well.

What am I missing? Thanks!

CodePudding user response：

You can use curl in R like this to include the auth header and the path to the desired file:

library(curl)
h <- new_handle(verbose = TRUE)
handle_setheaders(h,
  "Authorization" = "token ghp_XXXXXXX"
)
con <- curl("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/username/repo/branch/path/file.R", handle = h)
readLines(con)