lastversion 0.0.13

A CLI tool to fetch last GitHub release version

lastversion

A tiny command line utility that helps to answer one simple question:

What is the latest released version for a GitHub project?

GitHub has an API endpoint here. But if you're here, then you know how it sucks:

A release would show up in this API response only if it was filed formally using GitHub release interface. Thus, you can find many (if not most) GitHub projects whose Releases are simply not visible through the API, but only through the actual Releases page.

But we want to get last version on the command line, without looking at Releases page :). Meet lastversion.

Its primary use is for build systems - whenever you want to watch specific repositories for released versions in order to build packages automatically. Or otherwise require getting latest version in your automation scripts.

Like I do

Synopsys

lastversion apache/incubator-pagespeed-ngx #> 1.13.35.2

That repository specifically, is a good example. Because using only API on it will yield an ancient release:

lastversion --nosniff apache/incubator-pagespeed-ngx #> 1.9.32.10

Why is because at some point the maintainers of the repository did a formal UI release, but later used the standard approach.

Sure enough, this can't work in 100% cases, especially if developers did not tag their releases in a sane manner - some don't even provide a version number in their "release tags".

But hey, it works for most repositories and I've added Travis tests for some various repositories.

Usage

Typically, you would just pass the repository URL (or repo owner/name to it) as the only argument, e.g.:

lastversion https://github.com/gperftools/gperftools

Equivalently accepted invocation with same output is:

lastversion gperftools/gperftools    

For more options to control output or behavior, see --help output:

usage: lastversion [-h] [--nosniff] [--novalidate] [--pre] [--verbose]
                  [--format {json,version}] [--version]
                  REPO

Get latest release from GitHub.

positional arguments:
 REPO                  GitHub repository in format owner/name

optional arguments:
 -h, --help            show this help message and exit
 --nosniff             Only use GitHub API, no HTML parsing (worse)
 --novalidate
 --pre                 Include pre-releases in potential versions
 --verbose
 --format {json,version}
                       Output format
 --version             show program's version number and exit

The --nosniff will disable the magic and only API will be used (yuck).

The --novalidate will disable validation of fetched version.

Installation for CentOS 7

yum install https://extras.getpagespeed.com/release-el7-latest.rpm
yum install python2-lastversion

Installation for other systems

The script is primarily developed for Python 2.7, but is known to work with recent versions like Python 3.7. Installing with pip is easiest:

pip install lastversion

Tips

If you're planning to fetch versions for a whole lot of projects, setup your GitHub API token in ~/.bashrc like this:

export GITHUB_API_TOKEN=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

So lastversion will use it to get larger API calls allowance from GitHub. Although this is rarely needed, because lastversion usually does not resort to API calls because it finds release version through parsing Releases page earlier.