How to get file path? How to fetch a file?

OnkelTem · August 9, 2021, 10:12am

I cannot get a file from our gitlab repository.

From the docs it follows that paths should be like:

curl --header "PRIVATE-TOKEN: <your_access_token>" "https://gitlab.example.com/api/v4/projects/13083/repository/files/app%2Fmodels%2Fkey%2Erb/raw?ref=master"

but in the GitLab UI I couldn’t manage to find ANYTHING like that.
The best I could find so far looks like this:

https://gitlab.example.com/group/group/myproject/-/raw/develop/file.yaml

I searched carefully in the UI but there is no API links or paths to a file.
How do you manage to use it?

dnsmichi · August 10, 2021, 7:19pm

Hi,

is the project ID which you need to pass into the API request URL. That can be seen in the project overview in the UI, or by searching/getting the project via API.

For the API request itself, the endpoint is constructed with /api/v4/projects/13083/repository/files/ and the file structure underneath.

If I navigate to a specific file, https://gitlab.com/everyonecancontribute/web/everyonecancontribute.gitlab.io/-/blob/main/config.toml I know that /blob/main is the reference to the current branch main and everything after it represents the relative file path.

It is manual work though, and I try to avoid constructing URLs without first having searched and matched a pattern, e.g. fetching all files with the *.toml or *.md file suffix.

Repository tree search
Use file_path in the URL to fetch the raw content

I’m a fan of more programmatic approach with abstracting the API client to e.g. python-gitlab. I’ve created a quick example code snippet.

Works pretty good, never did that myself before.

Cheers,
Michael