Is there a link to GitHub for downloading a file in the latest release of a repository?

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-pag

Answer 1

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.