Grab is a tool that downloads source code repositories into a convenient directory layout created from the repo's URL's domain and path. It supports Git, Mercurial (hg), Subversion, and Bazaar repositories.

$ grab github.com/jmhodges/grab # https://github.com/jmhodges/grab also works.

$ ls ~/src/github.com/jmhodges/grab
LICENSE   README.md go.mod    go.sum    grab      main.go

By default, grab downloads into $HOME/src (overridable with the env var GRAB_HOME or the config file). So, in this example, the repo github.com/jmhodges/grab was stored in it with the domain (github.com) as the top-level directory, and jmhodges and grab created as subdirectories down the path.

Also, the input to grab doesn't have to contain a scheme (e.g. https://) to work.

Grab can be installed by running go install github.com/jmhodges/grab@latest.

Grab can be configured with the GRAB_HOME environment variable and further configurations (including that setting) can be set with a TOML config file at grab/config.toml inside your platforms configuration directory.

(On Windows, that's in %AppData%. On macOS, that's $HOME/.config/ or $HOME/Library/Application Support/grab if .config/grab/config.toml doesn't exist. On Linux and BSD, that's $XDG_CONFIG_HOME or $HOME/.config/ if that's not set.)

The config settings in config.toml and the existenc of config.toml itself are optional.

home = "/home/user/src" # prefer the env var GRAB_HOME if shell-variables are needed
ssh_preferred_hosts = ["github.com", "gitlab.com"]

• home: The directory to download repos into. Equivalent to GRAB_HOME.
• ssh_preferred_hosts: A list of hosts for which git clone URLs should be rewritten from HTTPS to SSH (e.g. git@github.com:user/repo.git).

The environment variable GRAB_HOME overrides home and GRAB_HOME is preferred if you need shell variables in it (like ~ or $HOME).