Downloading the Very Latest Release

In principle, every project should have a pointer as an URL to the latest version of their published software but this is frequently not the case and the "tags" section of most projects just contain version milestones. The github REST API alleviates some of the trouble with locating the very latest release but it is still a matter of using multiple commands. Here is an example command-call to download the latest xidel binary to the local directory:

curl \
    -s \
    -L 'https://api.github.com/repos/benibela/xidel/releases/latest' | \
    jq '.assets[].browser_download_url' | \
    grep linux64 | \
    xargs curl -s -L -o - | \
    tar -zxvf -

where:

• benibela is the vendor,
• xidel is the project

Furthermore, the command contains a matcher, namely linux64 because there is no canonical order to a release such that the specific file that is wanted must be matched. In this case, xidel is distributed both as source and binary, and for the sake of the command only the x64 Linux binary is desired. The rest of the command retrieves and unpacks the files to the local directory.