using git clone

28 Sep 2025 - jhunter

Sources

copilot.microsoft.com

dummies.com

github.com

Summary

Modern software licenses encourage and often require coders to make their code freely available.

If you’re used to using a simple execitable file to run a program, using code might seem intimidating.

This blog gives a brief example of using code from github with git clone.

I assume you already have git bash installed in your shell.

Finding code

Today, LLM websites like copilot.microsoft can be used like google.com to find code projects.

I asked copilot:

Is there an API to query data from the UK pop music charts?

In response I got a link to this project on github: github.com.

Accessing code

I went to the link, and read the README.md file to see if it’s what I wanted. To install the code I did the following:

cd Documents
git clone https://github.com/datamgmt/Music-Chart-Downloader.git

I did try to run a code but it failed, however a quick check online for the error gave me the fix which I did:

pip install beautifulsoup4

Using the code

Now I can use the examples from the README.me file:

~/Documents/Music-Chart-Downloader/mcd.py --chart uk-singles --startdate 20031201 --enddate 20031231 --output_type json --output_set weekly

Result

The code has created the data requested, which is of in json format.

Now that the data is available I can parse it how I like, but that is another topic.