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##*/}"