How to download a folder from Google Colab

Google Colab’s UI from its file browser allows you to download files individually, but does not have an option to download entire directories; the solution is simple and can be done with code.

I encountered this problem while using Google Colab to develop my gabo-rag project, basically my idea was to connect to a GPU environment to create the Vector Database and then use it persistently for testing.

After waiting a while for my code to finish executing, I tried to download the resulting directory, but I couldn’t find a simple solution quickly. This is the solution I ended up using.

Download a File #

Downloading a file using code is very easy, we only need to use:

from google.colab import files

files.download("data.csv")

However, this has a problem, files.download() only works for files, it is not possible to download a folder in this way.

Compress a Folder into a File #

Sometimes the simplest or most obvious solutions are the most effective, in this case all we need is to convert our directory into a single compressed file.

import shutil

shutil.make_archive("dir_to_compress", "zip", "name_zip")

Download a Folder #

Now you only have to use files.download() to download the compressed file we generated in the previous section.

from google.colab import files

files.download("name_zip.zip")

Finally you just have to unzip the file locally on your computer. If you need the complete code it is here:

from google.colab import files
import shutil

shutil.make_archive("dir_to_compress", "zip", "name_zip")
files.download("name_zip.zip")