Is there a link to GitHub for downloading a file i

Question

Using GitHub's Release feature, it is possible to provide a link to download a specific version of the published software. However, every time a release is made, the gh-page also needs to be updated.

Is there a way to get a link to a specific file of whatever the latest version of a software is?

e.g., this would be a static link:

https://github.com/USER/PROJECT/releases/download/v0.0.0/package.zip

What I'd like is something like:

https://github.com/USER/PROJECT/releases/download/latest/package.zip

NOTE: The difference between this question and GitHub latest release is that this question specifically asks for getting access to the file, not the GitHub latest release page

Answer 1

You can do an ajax request to get latest release download URL using the GitHub Releases API. It also shows when it was released and the download count:

function GetLatestReleaseInfo() {
  $.getJSON("https://api.github.com/repos/ShareX/ShareX/releases/latest").done(function(release) {
    var asset = release.assets[0];
    var downloadCount = 0;
    for (var i = 0; i < release.assets.length; i++) {
      downloadCount += release.assets[i].download_count;
    }
    var oneHour = 60 * 60 * 1000;
    var oneDay = 24 * oneHour;
    var dateDiff = new Date() - new Date(asset.updated_at);
    var timeAgo;
    if (dateDiff < oneDay) {
      timeAgo = (dateDiff / oneHour).toFixed(1) + " hours ago";
    } else {
      timeAgo = (dateDiff / oneDay).toFixed(1) + " days ago";
    }
    var releaseInfo = release.name + " was updated " + timeAgo + " and downloaded " + downloadCount.toLocaleString() + " times.";
    $(".download").attr("href", asset.browser_download_url);
    $(".release-info").text(releaseInfo);
    $(".release-info").fadeIn("slow");
  });
}

GetLatestReleaseInfo();

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<a class="download" href="https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/releases/latest">Download</a>
<p class="release-info"></p>

It is important for you to set the default button URL to the releases page (like https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/releases/latest) so if the browser does not support ajax (or javascript) or is too slow to get the URL, the download button will still work.

When the Ajax request completes, the URL of this button will change automatically to a direct download URL.

Edit:

I also made a downloads page that shows multiple releases which you can find here: https://getsharex.com/downloads/

Source code of it: https://github.com/ShareX/sharex.github.io/blob/master/js/downloads.js

Answer 2

As noted previously, jq is useful for this and other REST APIs.

tl;dr - more details below

Assuming you want the macOS release:

URL=$( curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/atom/atom/releases/latest" \
   | jq -r '.assets[] | select(.name=="atom-mac.zip") | .browser_download_url' )
curl -LO "$URL"

Solution for atom releases

Note each repo can have different ways of providing the desired artifact, so I will demonstrate for a well-behaved one like atom.

Get the names of the assets published

curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/atom/atom/releases/latest" \
    | jq -r '.assets[] | .name'

atom-1.15.0-delta.nupkg
atom-1.15.0-full.nupkg
atom-amd64.deb
...

Get the download URL for the desired asset

Below atom-mac is my desired asset via jq's select(.name=="atom-mac.zip")

curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/atom/atom/releases/latest" \
    | jq -r '.assets[] | select(.name=="atom-mac.zip") | .browser_download_url'

https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/download/v1.15.0/atom-mac.zip

Download the artifact

curl -LO "https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/download/v1.15.0/atom-mac.zip"

jq Playground

jq syntax can be difficult. Here's a playground for experimenting with the jq above: https://jqplay.org/s/h6_LfoEHLZ

Security

You should take measures to ensure the validity of the downloaded artifact via sha256sum and gpg, if at all possible.

Answer 3

Not possible according to GitHub support as of 2018-05-23

Contacted [e-mail] on 2018-05-23 with message:

Can you just confirm that there is no way besides messing with API currently?

and they replied:

Thanks for reaching out. We recommend using the API to fetch the latest release because that approach is stable, documented, and not subject to change any time soon:

https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/releases/#get-the-latest-release

I will also keep tracking this at: https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/658

Python solution without any dependencies

Robust and portable:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import json
import urllib.request

_json = json.loads(urllib.request.urlopen(urllib.request.Request(
    'https://api.github.com/repos/cirosantilli/linux-kernel-module-cheat/releases/latest',
     headers={'Accept': 'application/vnd.github.v3+json'},
)).read())
asset = _json['assets'][0]
urllib.request.urlretrieve(asset['browser_download_url'], asset['name'])

See also:

• What is the quickest way to HTTP GET in Python?
• Basic http file downloading and saving to disk in python?

Also consider pre-releases

/latest does not see pre-releases, but it is easy to do since /releases shows the latest one first:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import json
import urllib.request

_json = json.loads(urllib.request.urlopen(urllib.request.Request(
    'https://api.github.com/repos/cirosantilli/linux-kernel-module-cheat/releases',
     headers={'Accept': 'application/vnd.github.v3+json'},
)).read())
asset = _json[0]['assets'][0]
urllib.request.urlretrieve(asset['browser_download_url'], asset['name'])

Answer 4

If you want to use just curl you can try with -w '%{url_effective}' that prints the URL after a redirect chain (followed by curl if you invoke it with -L). So, for example

curl -sLo /dev/null -w '%{url_effective}' https://github.com/github-tools/github/releases/latest

outputs https://github.com/github-tools/github/releases/tag/v3.1.0.

Answer 5

in PHP - redirect to the latest release download. Simply put on your webspace

<?php

/**
 * Download latest release from github release articats
 * License: Public Domain
 */

define('REPO', 'imi-digital/iRobo');

$opts = [
    'http' => [
        'method' => 'GET',
        'header' => [
            'User-Agent: PHP'
        ]
    ]
];

$context = stream_context_create($opts);

$releases = file_get_contents('https://api.github.com/repos/' . REPO . '/releases', false, $context);
$releases = json_decode($releases);

$url = $releases[0]->assets[0]->browser_download_url;

header('Location: ' . $url);

Answer 6

A solution using (an inner) wget to get the HTML content, filter it for the zip file (with egrep) and then download the zip file (with the outer wget).

wget https://github.com/$(wget https://github.com/<USER>/<PROJECT>/releases/latest -O - | egrep '/.*/.*/.*zip' -o)