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

Like most visiting this question, I was absolutely frustrated with finding a way to fully automate download of the LATEST versioned release or a repo in Github. The benefit of this solution is that you do not have to specify any release or tag number- it will just grab the LATEST.

I conducted my testing using the following Github user & repo:

"f1linux" = Github User
"pi-ap" = Repo

The arbitrary directory name the repo is saved to is set in:

--one-top-level="pi-ap"

DIRECT:

Using Firefox's "Web Developer" tools (3 bars in upper right corner), in the "Network" section I found https://api.github.com was redirecting to https://codeload.github.com, so by piping the curl to tar I was able to grab the latest versioned repo and save it to a predictable name so it could be operated on:

curl https://codeload.github.com/f1linux/pi-ap/legacy.tar.gz/master | tar xzvf - --one-top-level="pi-ap" --strip-components 1

INDIRECT:

After I achieved fully-automated downloads of the latest versioned release using a DIRECT URL, I turned my attention to achieving the same with Github's redirection:

curl -L https://api.github.com/repos/f1linux/pi-ap/tarball | tar xzvf - --one-top-level="pi-ap" --strip-components 1

Preferred Method:

However, please note as per Von's comment below that INDIRECT is the preferred method

Further Validation:

To ensure my results were reproducible to other versioned Github repos, the same tests were successfully executed for Digital Ocean's doctl api toolkit (which is what started the whole exercise actually!):

Both DIRECT and INDIRECT work using the same form as above, just changing the username & repo:

DIRECT:

curl https://codeload.github.com/digitalocean/doctl/legacy.tar.gz/master | tar xzvf - --one-top-level="doctl" --strip-components 1 

INDIRECT:

curl -L https://api.github.com/repos/digitalocean/doctl/tarball | tar xzvf - --one-top-level="doctl" --strip-components 1