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

Not possible according to GitHub support as of 2018-05-23

Contacted support@github.com on 2018-05-23 with message:

Can you just confirm that there is no way besides messing with API currently?

and they replied:

Thanks for reaching out. We recommend using the API to fetch the latest release because that approach is stable, documented, and not subject to change any time soon:

https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/releases/#get-the-latest-release

I will also keep tracking this at: https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/658

Python solution without any dependencies

Robust and portable:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import json
import urllib.request

_json = json.loads(urllib.request.urlopen(urllib.request.Request(
    'https://api.github.com/repos/cirosantilli/linux-kernel-module-cheat/releases/latest',
     headers={'Accept': 'application/vnd.github.v3+json'},
)).read())
asset = _json['assets'][0]
urllib.request.urlretrieve(asset['browser_download_url'], asset['name'])

See also:

• What is the quickest way to HTTP GET in Python?
• Basic http file downloading and saving to disk in python?

Also consider pre-releases

/latest does not see pre-releases, but it is easy to do since /releases shows the latest one first:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import json
import urllib.request

_json = json.loads(urllib.request.urlopen(urllib.request.Request(
    'https://api.github.com/repos/cirosantilli/linux-kernel-module-cheat/releases',
     headers={'Accept': 'application/vnd.github.v3+json'},
)).read())
asset = _json[0]['assets'][0]
urllib.request.urlretrieve(asset['browser_download_url'], asset['name'])