Shell - Get latest release from GitHub

get_latest_release.sh

get_latest_release() {
  curl --silent "https://api.github.com/repos/$1/releases/latest" | # Get latest release from GitHub api
    grep '"tag_name":' |                                            # Get tag line
    sed -E 's/.*"([^"]+)".*/\1/'                                    # Pluck JSON value
}

# Usage
# $ get_latest_release "creationix/nvm"
# v0.31.4

Nice one! Thanks!

If you are in the repo, you can simply use: git tag | tail -1. Maybe you need to do a git fetch --tags before :).

But your approach is a good trick.

Hi,
I made a version without sed, only using grep.
Maybe its useful...

curl --silent "https://api.github.com/repos/$1/releases/latest" | grep -Po '"tag_name": "\K.*?(?=")'

Thanks, for sharing the great idea! 👍

Another alternative:
curl --silent "https://api.github.com/repos/$1/releases/latest" | jq -r .tag_name

You can also get the download link directly:
jq -r '.assets[0].browser_download_url
or by name:
jq -r '.assets[] | select(.name == "nameofobject").browser_download_url')
(replace nameofobject with whatever you want to get).

To get latest tag, for example if the repo doesn't utilise GitHub releases.

function get_latest_release() {
    curl --silent "https://api.github.com/repos/certbot/certbot/tags" | jq -r '.[0].name'
}

I combined all the resources I found on the subject to come up with a one-liner to grab docker-compose assuming you have jq installed.

curl --silent "https://api.github.com/repos/docker/compose/releases/latest" | jq --arg PLATFORM_ARCH "$(echo `uname -s`-`uname -m`)" -r '.assets[] | select(.name | endswith($PLATFORM_ARCH)).browser_download_url' | xargs sudo curl -L -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose --url

This could easily be put into a function where you pass the name of the repository and the platform or architecture you want to download. Sadly for a lot of releases it could be anything, ie amd64, x86_64, i386, i586, i686, or others depending on the packaging tool they used. You can use select(.name | test "Linux*64") or some similar regex in that case to get pretty close, or just return a list of releases and have the user select the one they want via ncurses/zenity/etc.

Thanks a lot!! It worked perfectly on my problem!! I made a shell function to find assets of latest release that will work with python 3.x.

getLatest() {
  REPO=$1
  SUFFIX=$2
  curl --silent https://api.github.com/repos/$REPO/releases/latest | \
    python -c "import sys; from json import loads as l; x = l(sys.stdin.read()); print(''.join(s['browser_download_url'] for s in x['assets'] if s['name'].endswith('.$SUFFIX')))"
}

Can be done with git ls-remote and sed too.

only the original is valid

if I try all the others I get "jq not found", jq is more bloated than sed so I dont see the logic in replacing sed with jq

-P is invalid flag for grep

The problem with the original is it outputs with v at the start which needs removing, otherwise its perfect.

append this to end cut -c 2-

curl --silent "https://api.github.com/repos/$1/releases/latest" | # Get latest release from GitHub api grep '"tag_name":' | # Get tag line sed -E 's/.*"([^"]+)".*/\1/' | # Pluck JSON value cut -c 2- # Remove v

See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3074288/get-url-after-curl-is-redirected

An easier way:

$ curl -fsSLI -o /dev/null -w %{url_effective} https://github.com/hadolint/hadolint/releases/latest && echo
https://github.com/hadolint/hadolint/releases/tag/v1.15.0

@chrcoluk

if I try all the others I get "jq not found" ....

That's because it's not installed or in your $PATH

... jq is more bloated than sed so I dont see the logic in replacing sed with jq

jq is BY FAR alot more efficient than anything else at processing JSON.

-P is invalid flag for grep

From grep --help:

  -P, --perl-regexp         PATTERN is a Perl regular expression

PCRE - Perl Compatible Regular Expressions

The problem with the original is it outputs with v at the start which needs removing, otherwise its perfect.

How would that be a problem? Im curious.

append this to end cut -c 2-

Using cut makes alot less sense than the above quotes

From @peschu123 Post's

grep -Po '"tag_name": "\K.*?(?=")'

to

grep -Po '"tag_name": "v\K.*?(?=")'

A single character gets rid of your ennemy.

curl --silent "https://api.github.com/repos/$1/releases/latest" | # Get latest release from GitHub api grep '"tag_name":' | # Get tag line sed -E 's/.*"([^"]+)".*/\1/' | # Pluck JSON value cut -c 2- # Remove v

By the looks of this one, it also seems you could use a Markdown syntax refresher course, dear sysadmin

Very nice.

Perfect. Thanks.

awesome

See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3074288/get-url-after-curl-is-redirected

An easier way:

$ curl -fsSLI -o /dev/null -w %{url_effective} https://github.com/hadolint/hadolint/releases/latest && echo
https://github.com/hadolint/hadolint/releases/tag/v1.15.0

Thanks a lot for that!

curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/$REPO/releases/latest" | awk -F '"' '/tag_name/{print $4}'

Anyone know why this doesn't work on aws/aws-cli releases? It has releases, but

curl "https://api.github.com/repos/aws/aws-cli/releases/"

produces:

{
  "message": "Not Found",
  "documentation_url": "https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/releases/#get-the-latest-release"
}

@wval

curl "https://api.github.com/repos/aws/aws-cli/tags" | jq '.[].name'          
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--100 12643  100 12643    0     0  17366      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 17366
"2.0.0dev0"
"1.16.96"
"1.16.95"
"1.16.94"
"1.16.93"
"1.16.92"
"1.16.91"
"1.16.90"
"1.16.89"
"1.16.88"
"1.16.87"
"1.16.86"
"1.16.85"
"1.16.84"
"1.16.83"
"1.16.82"
"1.16.81"
"1.16.80"
"1.16.79"
"1.16.78"
"1.16.77"
"1.16.76"
"1.16.75"
"1.16.74"
"1.16.73"
"1.16.72"
"1.16.71"
"1.16.70"
"1.16.69"
"1.16.68"

same thing with https://api.github.com/repos/docker/engine/releases/latest Not found
even stranger: https://api.github.com/repos/openwrt/openwrt/releases/latest and https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/releases don't have the same latest release....
going to use tags

get_latest_release_number() {
  curl --silent "https://github.com/$1/releases/latest" | sed 's#.*tag/\(.*\)\".*#\1#'
}

# Usage
# $ get_latest_release_number "creationix/nvm"
# v0.34.0

Windows cmd no dependencies ...

FOR /F delims^=^"^ tokens^=2 %%g IN ('curl --silent %LATEST_URL%') DO ( set "LATEST_TAG=%%~nxg" )

A more pure approach with no dependencies on jq.

Replace ${user} with the user/organization name and ${repository} with the project name in the one-liner below.

latest_tag_url=$(curl -sI https://github.com/${user}/${repository}/releases/latest | grep -iE "^Location:"); echo "${latest_tag_url##*/}"

What is it doing?

That "location url" is a part of the header, so I pass -I to get the headers and then grep for Location:. This provides the url for the latest tag. I wrapped the entire curl and grep operations to perform command substitution and assign it with a variable of latest_tag_url. I then echo the latest_tag_url variable and perform substring removal to show only the tag at the end of the url.

Real Example:

> latest_tag_url=$(curl -sI https://github.com/stedolan/jq/releases/latest | grep -iE "^Location:"); echo "${latest_tag_url##*/}"
jq-1.6

This is a bit cleaner ...
LATEST_TAG="$(curl -sI "${LATEST_URL}" | grep -Po 'tag\/\K(v\S+)')"

How about getting the release date information? I am trying to get version, and release date. I've got the version number parsed and cleaned up. Can someone please point me in the right direction?

This is all too weak you guys. As mentioned by many - GitHub API won't return actual Releases in many cases when releases were not filed formally. Those releases that don't appear are not less releases than the others :)

Thus I have created lastversion CLI tool.

How about this one liner:

lastversion user/repo 

Will give you the version of latest release even if it's not present in the API response! :)

# Get final URL after curl is redirected
RELEASE_URL=$(curl -Ls -o /dev/null -w %{url_effective} https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/latest)
# Extract tag after the last forward slash 
TAG="${RELEASE_URL##*/}"

Thanks a lot!! It worked perfectly on my problem!! I made a shell function to find assets of latest release that will work with python 3.x.

getLatest() {
  REPO=$1
  SUFFIX=$2
  curl --silent https://api.github.com/repos/$REPO/releases/latest | \
    python -c "import sys; from json import loads as l; x = l(sys.stdin.read()); print(''.join(s['browser_download_url'] for s in x['assets'] if s['name'].endswith('.$SUFFIX')))"
}

I have adapted this code for one of my use cases, in which the criteria to select for is the ".tgz" extension (as opposed to .zip etc for windows).

curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/beast-dev/beast-mcmc/releases/latest" | jq --arg PLATFORM_ARCH "tgz" -r '.assets[] | select(.name | endswith($PLATFORM_ARCH)).browser_download_url' | xargs curl -L -o /beast1.tgz

This works as expected and downloads the release as beast1.tgz.

However, another use case is more complicated, its releases have many versions, separated by format (e.g. .tgz .zip) and inclusion of JRE. I'm trying to select for the .tgz WITHOUT JRE, which is denoted in the middle of the string (BEAST_with_JRE.v2.5.2.Linux.tgz vs BEAST.v2.5.2.Linux.tgz). I've attempted to use the wildcard, i.e. PLATFORM_ARCH "BEAST.v*.tgz" but this does not work. I've tried Googling "curl select endswith" to try and find the 'language' to find alternatives to 'endswith', but all I get are java methods which don't fit with this format.

Could anyone please give me a little hand here and point me in the right direction?

Another variant that helps to install last version of dxvk before running Steam:

#!/bin/sh

archive_path="/tmp/dxvk"
mkdir -p "$archive_path"

curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/doitsujin/dxvk/releases/latest" | \
  grep -Po "['\"]browser_download_url['\"]\s*:\s*['\"]\K(.*)(?=['\"])" | \
  xargs -n1 curl -sL | \
  tar xvfz - -C "$archive_path" --strip 1 > /dev/null

sh "$archive_path/setup_dxvk.sh" install

wine Steam.exe -no-cef-sandbox

@andrew-aladev or, using lastversion

#!/bin/sh

archive_path="/tmp/dxvk"
mkdir -p "$archive_path"

curl -sL $(lastversion --source doitsujin/dxvk) | \
  tar xvfz - -C "$archive_path" --strip 1 > /dev/null

sh "$archive_path/setup_dxvk.sh" install

wine Steam.exe -no-cef-sandbox

which will take care of things if repo maintainer forgets to tag a formal release.

See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3074288/get-url-after-curl-is-redirected

An easier way:

$ curl -fsSLI -o /dev/null -w %{url_effective} https://github.com/hadolint/hadolint/releases/latest && echo
https://github.com/hadolint/hadolint/releases/tag/v1.15.0

Thank you for this!

Building on this, we can use basename to get just the tag value. Don't need to install jq on your system.

basename $(curl -Ls -o /dev/null -w %{url_effective} ${LATEST_GITHUB_RELEASE_URL}

# Example:
basename $(curl -Ls -o /dev/null -w %{url_effective} https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/aws-iam-authenticator/releases/latest
v0.4.0

My attempt to solve this: ghi.

It aims to be the reverse operation of ghr CLI tool. More improvements can be done of course. Let me know what you think!

My solution for ansible playbooks. But it has python-jmespath dependency for json_query filter:

- name: Get urls for latest release of a heplify-server
  uri:
    url: https://api.github.com/repos/sipcapture/heplify-server/releases/latest
    body_format: json
    return_content: true
  changed_when: false
  register: helplify_server_version

- name: Parse heplify server binary url
  set_fact:
    heplify_server_url: "{{ helplify_server_version.json | json_query(query) | first }}"
  vars:
    query: "assets[?name=='heplify-server'].browser_download_url"

- debug:
    msg: "{{ heplify_server_url }}"

Produces:

TASK [test-role : debug] *****************************************************
 ok: [instance] => {
     "msg": "https://github.com/sipcapture/heplify-server/releases/download/1.13/heplify-server"
 }

My hero

@dvershinin thank you for that tool! Just what I need and seems so much more simple than trying to use these various other approaches.

If only everything could be so universal!

"There is no consistency in human beings."
~~ https://github.com/dvershinin/lastversion

A somewhat simpler one:

curl -sL https://api.github.com/repos/$1/releases/latest | grep '"tag_name":' | cut -d'"' -f4

Anyone know why this doesn't work on aws/aws-cli releases? It has releases, but

curl "https://api.github.com/repos/aws/aws-cli/releases/"

produces:

{
  "message": "Not Found",
  "documentation_url": "https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/releases/#get-the-latest-release"
}

It's your trailing slash
curl "https://api.github.com/repos/aws/aws-cli/releases"

@trentmillar this is due to API limitations. You can use lastversion, e.g.:

lastversion https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/
#> 1.18.31

@trentmillar this is due to API limitations. You can use lastversion, e.g.:

lastversion https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/
#> 1.18.31

No, but I get his question and my response to it could be off topic, I was replying to @vwal's issue where he was attempting to hit an unknown route because he appended "/" at the end of the endpoint.

If you simply attempt to execute curl "https://api.github.com/repos/aws/aws-cli/releases/" which he did you will get "Not found" if you change it by dropping the trailing "/" it hits the endpoint. That's all

thanks you !

what about using basename?

lastversion() {
    basename $(curl -fs -o/dev/null -w %{redirect_url} $1/releases/latest)
}

what about using basename?

lastversion() {
    basename $(curl -fs -o/dev/null -w %{redirect_url} $1/releases/latest)
}

Excellent! More concise!

if you need a more universal answer, you can use git ls-remote --tags https://github.com/rust-lang/rust.git to get the list of all the tags from the remote without need to clone.

@lestofante That is also a very good suggestion! But this solution will only work if there are no more tags than just the release version tags. And as long as release versions are tracked as tags in the repository. **edit** It would probably not differantiate between pre-releases and stable releases either.

From what I can tell, the github. com/github/hub command line command will help us a lot with these things in the near future!

@artheus yes I focus on be able to support any git repo more than specific github functionality.

Just some little correction

will only work if there are no more tags

in that case you can add some grep/awk to extrapolate only what you need.
Yes it will break if upstream change naming scheme, but on the other hand it work with any git repo, not only github

And as long as release versions are tracked as tags in the repository

i am pretty sure github (and others) create a tag for every release automatically and you cant opt-out

It would probably not differantiate between pre-releases and stable releases either.

yes you are right!
(My suggestion is to keep thin info in your naming scheme of release, so even just looking at that you know what is going on, or if you move to different service or working offline you still have those info, but of course everyone is king of its own repo)

If you are in the repo, you can simply use: git tag | tail -1. Maybe you need to do a git fetch --tags before :).

But your approach is a good trick.

Good tip, thx! but...

might not work as git tag sorts alphabetically by default:

$ git tag
v12.6
v12.6.1
v12.7
v12.8
v2.5
v2.5.1
v2.5.2
v2.5.3

I'm using git tag --sort=committerdate | tail -1 to have it sorted by the date of the commit they're tagged to.

Probably not Pythonic but Python way:

import requests
url = 'https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail/releases/latest'
r = requests.get(url)
version = r.url.split('/')[-1]

print(version)

Source: https://gist.github.com/zeldor/604a7817f9d142e908335e041ece0718

Very nice.
Good job !
Thanks

if you need a more universal answer, you can use git ls-remote --tags https://github.com/rust-lang/rust.git to get the list of all the tags from the remote without need to clone.

Nice! This is the one that works best for me (I prefer not depending on jq and the curl <url>/releases/latest based answers only yield <url>/releases but not the tag - maybe because I didn't explicitly create releases?).

Anyway, just to make it even a little bit easier to use:

lastrelease() { git ls-remote --tags "$1" | cut -d/ -f3- | tail -n1; }

lastrelease https://github.com/USER/REPO

You may also want to add another | grep or | sed to the pipe to filter for desired tagname patterns (e.g. exclude prereleases).

git ls-remote --refs --sort="version:refname" --tags $repo | cut -d/ -f3-|tail -n1

Must say I ❤️ the github community!
There are always people who takes the challenge to make something better, and shares their findings!
Keep up the great work everyone!

In Fish you can use string manipulation that is native, so no other dependencies than curl:

function get_latest_release_version \
    --argument-names user_repo

    curl \
        --silent \
        "https://api.github.com/repos/$user_repo/releases/latest" \
    | string match --regex  '"tag_name": "\K.*?(?=")'
end

Usage:

❯ get_latest_release_version "rafaelrinaldi/pure"
v3.0.0

Why not use jq?

curl --silent "https://api.github.com/repos/$1/releases/latest" | jq -r .tag_name

Example to get highest version, not just latest - because an LTS bugfix 1.2.3 could be released after a new major 3.x version

curl https://api.github.com/repos/mautic/mautic/releases -s | jq -r .[].tag_name | grep '^[0-9]\.[0-9]*\.[0-9]*$' | sort -nr | head -n
1

or find latest version for a specific major version:

curl https://api.github.com/repos/mautic/mautic/releases -s | jq -r .[].tag_name | grep '^2\.[0-9]*\.[0-9]*$' -m1
curl https://api.github.com/repos/mautic/mautic/releases -s | jq -r .[].tag_name | grep '^3\.[0-9]*\.[0-9]*$' -m1

Hi,
I made a version without sed, only using grep.
Maybe it's useful...

curl --silent "https://api.github.com/repos/$1/releases/latest" | grep -Po '"tag_name": "\K.*?(?=")'

Thanks, for sharing the great idea!

Thanks!