Hungrycloner
Version: 1.0 Web: https://github.com/ mahmudz/hungrycloner
You may have noticed that most of our Hotpicks reside at Github. Not that this code-hosting provider is the only one out there, but it is definitely the most popular and even its acquisition by Microsoft hasn’t changed the situation significantly. Often we dig out small projects that don’t have readyto-use RPMS, DEBS, Appimages, Flatpaks or Snaps yet, and a patient reader will see that it is easy enough (see
page 48) to build an application from source. Recently we came across Hungrycloner, a small utility that possibly simplifies downloading source code from Github. In some way it fills the gap of the missing Github Desktop application for Linux, so let’s see in what way and how it can be helpful.
Hungrycloner provides a GUI for the $ git clone command – a very trivial thing, really! It does not really matter if you clone a Github repo with that command in your terminal or with a nifty Qt5-based graphical application, but things get more complicated if you need to handle multiple repositories hosted by the same Github account.
This is where Hungrycloner
rises and shines.
Fill in the ‘Github
Name’ field and hit the ‘Get Repos’ button. The ‘Repositories’ section below shows repositories from that account name. You can then download individual repos or grab them all after ticking the ‘Check All’ option. Hungrycloner is aware of the fact that some Github accounts may belong to organisations instead of mere mortals, so there is the dedicated ‘Select Type’ switch for choosing the right type of an account.
Hungrycloner saves a lot of time in case there are many repositories within an account that you all want to download at once. Ironically, getting Hungrycloner itself to run requires compilation from source code. Get the code in the traditional way this time and issue the following command:
$ qmake-qt5 && make
The application binary file will appear in the current directory after a while.