github-sandbox

📥 Download Files via Commit Message

A GitHub Actions workflow that lets you download files into your repository just by writing a special commit message — no terminal or command line needed.

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⚙️ Setup

0. Fork this repo
1. Go to your repository on GitHub
2. Click Settings → Actions → General
3. Scroll down to Workflow permissions
4. Select Read and write permissions and click Save

That's it — no tokens or secrets needed.

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🚀 Usage

You trigger downloads by editing any file directly on GitHub and using a special commit message when saving.

How to trigger a download

1. Open any file in your repository on GitHub (for example, this README.md)
2. Click the pencil icon (✏️) at the top right to edit it
3. Make any small change (add a space, a blank line, anything)
4. Scroll down to the Commit changes section
5. Select Commit directly to the main branch
6. In the commit message box, type one of the commands below
7. Click Commit changes

The workflow will run automatically and the downloaded files will appear in the downloads/ folder.

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📝 Commands

Download files individually

Downloads each file and saves it by its original filename.

download: URL1 URL2 URL3

Examples:

download: https://example.com/file.zip

download: https://example.com/a.zip https://example.com/b.pdf https://example.com/c.zip

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Download and archive into a single ZIP

Downloads all files and bundles them into one timestamped .zip archive saved to downloads/.

download-zip: URL1 URL2 URL3

Examples:

download-zip: https://example.com/file.zip

download-zip: https://example.com/a.zip https://example.com/b.pdf https://example.com/c.zip

The resulting archive will be named like: archive_20250423_153012.zip

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📁 Output

Command	Result
download:	Each file saved individually in downloads/ with its original name
download-zip:	All files bundled into a single archive_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.zip in downloads/

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👀 Checking the result

After committing, you can monitor the workflow:

1. Click the Actions tab in your repository
2. Click the latest workflow run to see progress and logs
3. Once it completes, go back to the Code tab and open the downloads/ folder to find your files

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⚠️ Notes

• URLs must be publicly accessible (no login required)
• Separate multiple URLs with spaces
• The workflow skips itself using [skip ci] in its own commit message to avoid infinite loops
• If no valid download: or download-zip: command is found in the commit message, the workflow will exit without doing anything