Download latest GitHub release

Question

I\'d like to have \"Download Latest Version\" button on my website which would represent the link to the latest release (stored at GitHub Releases

Answer 1

As noted by @Dan Dascalescu in a comment to accepted answer, there are some projects (roughly 30%) which do not bother to file formal releases, so neither "Latest release" button nor /releases/latest API call would return useful data.

To reliably fetch the latest release for a GitHub project, you can use lastversion.

Answer 2

Since February 18th, 2015, the GitHUb V3 release API has a get latest release API.

GET /repos/:owner/:repo/releases/latest

Answer 3

As I didn't see the answer here, but it was quite helpful for me while running continuous integration tests, this one-liner that only requires you to have curl will allow to search the Github repo's releases to download the latest version

https://gist.github.com/steinwaywhw/a4cd19cda655b8249d908261a62687f8

I use it to run PHPSTan on our repository using the following script

https://gist.github.com/rvanlaak/7491f2c4f0c456a93f90e31774300b62

Answer 4

You don't need any scripting to generate a download link for the latest release. Simply use this format:

https://github.com/:owner/:repo/zipball/:branch

Examples:

https://github.com/webix-hub/tracker/zipball/master
https://github.com/iDoRecall/selection-menu/zipball/gh-pages

---

If for some reason you want to obtain a link to the latest release download, including its version number, you can obtain that from the get latest release API:

GET /repos/:owner/:repo/releases/latest

Example:

$.get('https://api.github.com/repos/idorecall/selection-menu/releases/latest', function (data) {
  $('#result').attr('href', data.zipball_url);
});

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<a id="result">Download latest release (.ZIP)</a>

Answer 5

Maybe could you use some client-side scripting and dynamically generate the target of the link by invoking the GitHub api, through some JQuery magic?

The Releases API exposes a way to retrieve the list of all the releases from a repository. For instance, this link return a Json formatted list of all the releases of the ReactiveUI project.

Extracting the first one would return the latest release.

Within this payload:

• The html_url attribute will hold the first part of the url to build (ie. https://github.com/{owner}/{repository}/releases/{version}).

• The assets array will list of the downloadable archives. Each asset will bear a name attribute

Building the target download url is only a few string operations away.

• Insert the download/ keyword between the releases/ segment from the html_url and the version number
• Append the name of the asset to download

Resulting url will be of the following format: https://github.com/{owner}/{repository}/releases/download/{version}/name_of_asset

For instance, regarding the Json payload from the link ReactiveUI link above, we've got html_url: "https://github.com/reactiveui/ReactiveUI/releases/5.99.0" and one asset with name: "ReactiveUI.6.0.Preview.1.zip".

As such, the download url is https://github.com/reactiveui/ReactiveUI/releases/download/5.99.0/ReactiveUI.6.0.Preview.1.zip

Answer 6

Github now provides a "Latest release" button on the release page of a project, after you have created your first release.

In the example you gave, this button links to https://github.com/reactiveui/ReactiveUI/releases/latest