Simon Willison’s Weblog

What are the differences between “forking,” “cloning,” and downloading the project as a zip file on GitHub?

21st October 2013

My answer to What are the differences between “forking,” “cloning,” and downloading the project as a zip file on GitHub? on Quora

“fork” creates a copy of the project hosted on your own GitHub account. This is an exclusive Build software better, together. (links to: http://Github.com) feature and not a Git feature.

“clone” uses git software on your computer to download the source code and it’s entire version history.

“download zip” creates a zip file of just the current version of the source code for you to download—the project history is not included.

Posted 21st October 2013 at 6:29 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

My review of Claude's new Code Interpreter, released under a very confusing name - 9th September 2025
Recreating the Apollo AI adoption rate chart with GPT-5, Python and Pyodide - 9th September 2025
GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (aka Research Goblin) is shockingly good at search - 6th September 2025

This is What are the differences between “forking,” “cloning,” and downloading the project as a zip file on GitHub? by Simon Willison, posted on 21st October 2013.

git 50 github 168 quora 1005

Next: How can one become a masterful Rails developer (and still have a life)?

Previous: For a Django application, deployed on Heroku, what are my options for storing user-uploaded media files?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe