One Liner to Download the Latest Release from Github Repo

One Liner to Download the Latest Release from Github Repo.md

• Use curl to get the JSON response for the latest release
• Use grep to find the line containing file URL
• Use cut and tr to extract the URL
• Use wget to download it

curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/jgm/pandoc/releases/latest \
| grep "browser_download_url.*deb" \
| cut -d : -f 2,3 \
| tr -d \" \
| wget -qi -

Fair.
A general 1-liner, even to a specific git repo, is quite difficult to achieve.
But a 1-liner that can be easily adapted to a number of cases is a different thing and is something much easier to do.
The type of things you can look for here and in any other question-and-answers web sites.

The original 1st post here, was already a Unix shell-based solution, not a question, using 5 different commands, none aimed at JSON parsing and with inexplicably replicated functions between wget and curl. If the output from GitHub were moved to "compact JSON" (no newlines at all) by GitHub itself, then most of those JSON-unaware scripts would stop working.
The original solution, as most of the subsequent replies, has likely been created by merging 2 different sources.

I have shared my (rather limited) knowledge about scripting to get a simple, minimal and reliable 1-liner that can be easily adapted to a large number of cases.
It only uses 2 tools (wget and jq) aimed exactly at their goals (downloading via HTTP and reliably parsing JSON strings).
This is according to the Unix command line art of simplicity, IMHO.

"Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated."
-- Confucius

"It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials."
-- Bruce Lee

"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself."
-- Albert Einstein

Here is a solution for Windows, you need to put the repo owner and name, as well as a string to identify the download, the generic version of the command is below.

for /f "tokens=1,* delims=:" %a in ('curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/<Put repo owner and repo name here>/releases/latest ^| findstr "browser_download_url" ^| findstr "<Put identifying string here>"') do (curl -kOL %b)

Example
Putting the repo as notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus and the identifying string as .x64.exe we get this command:

for /f "tokens=1,* delims=:" %a in ('curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/releases/latest ^| findstr "browser_download_url" ^| findstr ".x64.exe"') do (curl -kOL %b)

Which downloads the latest x64 installer of Notepad++ to the current directory.

Here is the simplest way of getting the latest version with only curl and basename: Using the Forwarded url by github when accessing /latest:

basename $(curl -Ls -o /dev/null -w %{url_effective} https://github.com/<user>/<repo>/releases/latest)

Here another variant of it with only curl and a pure bash feature:

version=$(curl -Ls -o /dev/null -w %{url_effective} https://github.com/<user>/<repo>/releases/latest)
version=${version##*/}

Here is the simplest way of getting the latest version with only curl and basename: Using the Forwarded url by github when accessing /latest:

basename $(curl -Ls -o /dev/null -w %{url_effective} https://github.com/<user>/<repo>/releases/latest)

Here another variant of it with only curl and a pure bash feature:

version=$(curl -Ls -o /dev/null -w %{url_effective} https://github.com/<user>/<repo>/releases/latest)
version=${version##*/}

works great

Using jq to match a release file pattern (modsecurity-v.*.tar.gz$ in this example):

curl -sL https://api.github.com/repos/owasp-modsecurity/ModSecurity/releases/latest| \
jq -r '.assets[] | select(.name? | match("modsecurity-v.*.tar.gz$")) | .browser_download_url'

Another simple command using the fantastic Nushell
http get https://api.github.com/repos/<user>/<repo>/releases/latest | get tag_name