2

Sorry for asking what is probably a noob question.

I'm new to the GitHub and DevOps environments, and I've been tasked with automating some stuff. I've found a project on GitHub that is still maintained, and in the future will receive new releases.

I would like to build a pipeline in which I will need to download from GitHub the latest exe version for my specific environment.

At the moment, they have the release packages in their git repo, under /releases/vX.y.z (where X, y and z are release versions) with several packages, named like:

etc.

Considering the fact that the versions will change in time, is there any way I could wget a specific package by using some sort of pattern?

Happily the link: https://github.com/some-example-repo/releases/latest redirects towards the latest version released and so I was thinking of something like:

wget https://github.com/some-example-repo/download/*????/package.V???*-linux-arm64.tar.gz

Thinking about it, now that I've put this down as a question, I think it would be impossible for wget to auto-complete the URL...

Improve this question
1

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
18

If you really want to always download the latest release, you should use the GitHub API for this:

curl https://api.github.com/repos/$USER/$REPO/releases/latest

This will return a JSON document describing the latest release, including all artifacts; you can filter the result with jq, e.g.

| jq -r '.assets[].browser_download_url'

to extract all the asset download URLs.

In practice however it’s often a bad idea to always download the latest release, because any breaking change could break your CI. You should instead download a specific release and upgrade as appropriate manually (perhaps with automation to test new releases and suggest the corresponding PR).

Improve this answer
2
  • 1
    "because any breaking change could break your CI" - that and it will also be difficult to find out what environment specific builds/tests happened in (one will need to cross-reference build times with release schedules) leading to difficult to diagnose "works on my machine" bugs. Commented Aug 29, 2022 at 22:52
  • @user9123 I would expect the CI logs to keep a trace of what was downloaded, but if they don’t then yes, it could be complicated to determine what version was used after the fact. Commented Aug 30, 2022 at 5:48

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.