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 -

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