Cloning a private Github repo using a script

Just run the git command with subprocess.check_call:

import subprocess
subprocess.check_call(["git", "clone", ...])

There is a library, libgit2, which enables git to be used as a shared library more helpful to your cause is the python binding's pygit.

To answer your question using pygit to clone a repo:

>>> from pygit2 import clone_repository
>>> repo_url = 'git://github.com/libgit2/pygit2.git'
>>> repo_path = '/path/to/create/repository'
>>> repo = clone_repository(repo_url, repo_path) # Clones a non-bare repository
>>> repo = clone_repository(repo_url, repo_path, bare=True) # Clones a bare repository

You can view the repository based docs here

Here are my two cents since there's no answer yet to the repo being private. The way I usually do it is I create a special SSH key pair for the script and upload the public one to GitHub (or whatever hosting you're using).

You can have the script use the private key by running:

GIT_SSH_COMMAND='ssh -i private_key_file' git clone [email protected]:user/repo.git