Download repos with PHP and cURL from GitHub API as zip/tarball

php_curl_download_repos.php

<?php
/**
 *  Wasted half my evening trying to get this done.
 *  Those seems to be the only settings that works for
 *  downloading large repositories as zip/tarball
 *  from GitHub with PHP and cURL.
 *
 *  If you don't have to use PHP, then use cURL direcly:
 *  curl -L -v -H "Authorization: token PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN" https://api.github.com/repos/SOME_USER/SOME_REPO/zipball > dooone.zip
 */
$where_we_want_it_saved = 'destination/zipfile.zip';
$zip = fopen($where_we_want_it_saved, 'w');

$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://api.github.com/repos/SOME_USER/SOME_REPO/zipball');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 100);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 100);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FILE, $where_we_want_it_saved);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Chrome/64.0.3282.186 Safari/537.36');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Authorization: token PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN'));
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
$httpcode = curl_getinfo($curl , CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
$result = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);