  The number of open source software projects has been growing exponentially.
The major online software repository host, GitHub, has accumulated tens of
millions of publicly available Git version-controlled repositories. Although
the research potential enabled by the available open source code is clearly
substantial, no significant large-scale open source code datasets exist. In
this paper, we present the Public Git Archive -- dataset of 182,014
top-bookmarked Git repositories from GitHub. We describe the novel data
retrieval pipeline to reproduce it. We also elaborate on the strategy for
performing dataset updates and legal issues. The Public Git Archive occupies
3.0 TB on disk and is an order of magnitude larger than the current source code
datasets. The dataset is made available through HTTP and provides the source
code of the projects, the related metadata, and development history. The data
retrieval pipeline employs an optimized worker queue model and an optimized
archive format to efficiently store forked Git repositories, reducing the
amount of data to download and persist. Public Git Archive aims to open a
myriad of new opportunities for ``Big Code`` research.
