GitHub's built-in download button only ever gives you the whole repository. Here's how to grab just one folder instead — no cloning, no pasting URLs into a third-party website, no waiting for the entire repo to transfer.
Click the green "Code" button on any GitHub repo and choose "Download ZIP," and you'll get everything — every top-level folder, every file, regardless of which one you actually wanted. For a small repository that's a minor inconvenience. For a large monorepo where you only need the packages/ui-kit folder, it means downloading potentially gigabytes of unrelated code to get at a few megabytes you actually care about.
This is common enough that an entire category of third-party websites exists purely to solve it — you paste a GitHub folder URL in, wait for their server to fetch and zip it, and download the result from them. That works, but it means a third party's server sees exactly which repository and folder you're interested in, which is a real consideration for private work.
If you want a specific handful of files and folders rather than one whole directory, RepoKit also adds checkboxes to every row — select what you need, then use the same download action in the selection toolbar to bundle your exact picks into one .zip.
Because this runs entirely client-side inside the extension, every file request goes directly from your browser to GitHub's own API — never through a RepoKit-operated server, because there isn't one. This is a meaningful difference from paste-a-URL downloader websites for anyone downloading from private or sensitive repositories.
One click, no cloning, nothing routed through a third-party server.
Add RepoKit to Chrome — it's free
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