lastversion¤
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A tiny command-line utility that helps to answer a simple question:
What is the latest stable version for a project?
... and, optionally, download/install it.
lastversion
allows finding well-formatted, the latest release version of a project from these
supported locations:
- GitHub
- GitLab
- BitBucket
- PyPI
- Mercurial
- SourceForge
- Wikipedia
- WordPress plugin directory
- Arbitrary software sites which publish releases in RSS/ATOM feeds
Why you need lastversion
¤
In general, quite many project authors complicate finding the latest version by:
-
Creating a formal release that is clearly a Release Candidate (
rc
in tag), but forgetting to mark it as a pre-release -
Putting extraneous text in release tag e.g.
release-1.2.3
orname-1.2.3-2019
anything fancy like that -
Putting or not putting the
v
prefix inside release tags. Today yes, tomorrow not. I'm not consistent about it myself :) -
Switching from one version format to another, e.g.
v20150121
tov2.0.1
There is no consistency in human beings.
To deal with all this mess and simply get a well-formatted, last stable version (or download
URL!) on the command line, you can use lastversion
.
Its primary use is for build systems - whenever you want to watch specific projects for released versions to build packages automatically. Or otherwise require getting the latest version in your automation scripts.
lastversion
does a little bit of AI to detect if releasers mistakenly filed a beta version as a
stable release.
It incorporates logic for cleaning up human inconsistency from
version information.
Synopsis¤
lastversion apache/incubator-pagespeed-ngx
#> 1.13.35.2
lastversion download apache/incubator-pagespeed-ngx
#> downloaded incubator-pagespeed-ngx-v1.13.35.2-stable.tar.gz
lastversion download apache/incubator-pagespeed-ngx -o pagespeed.tar.gz
#> downloads with chosen filename
lastversion https://transmissionbt.com/
#> 3.0
lastversion format "mysqld Ver 5.6.51-91.0 for Linux"
#> 5.6.51
Installation for RPM-based systems¤
Supported:
- CentOS/RHEL 7, 8, 9 including clones like AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux
- Amazon Linux 2
- Fedora Linux
sudo yum -y install https://extras.getpagespeed.com/release-latest.rpm
sudo yum -y install lastversion
Installation for other systems¤
Installing with pip
is easiest:
pip install lastversion
Usage¤
Typically, you would just pass a repository URL (or repo owner/name to it) as the only argument, e.g.:
lastversion https://github.com/gperftools/gperftools
Equivalently accepted invocation with the same output is:
lastversion gperftools/gperftools
If you're lazy to even copy-paste a project's URL, you can just type its name as argument, which will use repository search API (slower). Helps to answer what is the latest Linux version:
lastversion linux
Or wondering what is the latest version of WordPress?
lastversion wordpress
A special value of self
for the main argument, will look up the last release of lastversion
itself.
For more options to control output or behavior, see --help
output:
usage: lastversion [-h] [--pre] [--sem {major,minor,patch,any}] [-v]
[-d [FILENAME]] [--format {version,assets,source,json,tag}]
[--assets] [--source] [-gt VER] [-b MAJOR] [--only REGEX]
[--exclude REGEX] [--filter REGEX] [--having-asset [ASSET]]
[-su] [--even]
[--at {github,gitlab,bitbucket,pip,hg,sf,website-feed,local,helm_chart,wiki,system,wp,gitea}]
[-y] [--version]
[{get,download,extract,unzip,test,format,install,update-spec}]
<repo URL or string>
Find the latest software release.
positional arguments:
{get,download,extract,unzip,test,format,install,update-spec}
Action to run. Default: get
<repo URL or string> Repository in format owner/name or any URL that
belongs to it, or a version string
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--pre Include pre-releases in potential versions
--sem {major,minor,patch,any}
Semantic versioning level base to print or compare
against
-v, --verbose Will give you an idea of what is happening under the
hood, -vv to increase verbosity level
-d [FILENAME], -o [FILENAME], --download [FILENAME], --output [FILENAME]
Download with custom filename
--format {version,assets,source,json,tag}
Output format
--assets Returns assets download URLs for last release
--source Returns only source URL for last release
-gt VER, --newer-than VER
Output only if last version is newer than given
version
-b MAJOR, --major MAJOR, --branch MAJOR
Only consider releases of a specific major version,
e.g. 2.1.x
--only REGEX Only consider releases containing this text. Useful
for repos with multiple projects inside
--exclude REGEX Only consider releases NOT containing this text.
Useful for repos with multiple projects inside
--even Only even versions like 1.[2].x, or 3.[6].x are
considered as stable
--filter REGEX Filters --assets result by a regular expression
--having-asset [ASSET]
Only consider releases with this asset
-su, --shorter-urls A tiny bit shorter URLs produced
--at {github,gitlab,bitbucket,pip,hg,sf,website-feed,local,helm_chart,wiki,system,wp,gitea}
If the repo argument is one word, specifies where to
look up the project. The default is via internal
lookup or GitHub Search
-y, --assumeyes Automatically answer yes for all questions
--version show program's version number and exit
The --format
will affect what kind of information from the last release and in which format will
be displayed, e.g.:
-
version
is the default. Simply outputs well-formatted version number of the latest release -
assets
will output a newline-separated list of assets URLs (if any), otherwise link to sources archive -
source
will output link to source archive, no matter if the release has some assets added -
json
can be used by external Python modules or for debugging, it is dict/JSON output of an API call that satisfied last version checks -
tag
will emit just the latest release's tag name, which useful if you're constructing download URL yourself or need the tag name otherwise
An asset is a downloadable file that typically represents an executable, or otherwise "ready to launch" project. It's what you see filed under formal releases, and is usually a compiled (for a specific platform), program.
Source files are either tarballs or zipballs of sources for the source code of release.
You can display either assets or source URLs of the latest release, by passing the corresponding
--format flag
, e.g. --format source
You also simply pass --source
instead of --format source
, and --assets
instead of
--format assets
, as in:
lastversion --assets mautic/mautic
#> https://github.com/mautic/mautic/archive/2.15.1/mautic-2.15.1.tar.gz
By default, lastversion
filters output of --assets
to be OS-specific. Who needs .exe
on Linux?
To override this behavior, you can use --filter
, which has a regular expression as its argument.
To disable OS filtering, use --filter .
, this will match everything.
You can naturally use --filter
in place where you would use grep
, e.g.
lastversion --assets --filter win REPO
Use case: Work with a multi-project repository¤
Sometimes a single repository actually hosts many components, and creates releases that have separate version line for each component.
To help lastversion
get a component's version for such repos, use --only
and --exclude
switches.
They make lastversion
look at only those releases which are tagged (or not) with specified
strings.
lastversion --only chart https://github.com/lastversion-test-repos/autoscaler
The above will report 9.16.0
.
lastversion --exclude chart https://github.com/lastversion-test-repos/autoscaler
The above will report a non-chart latest version, 1.23.0
.
Useful for hard cases, you can pass in regular expressions for both arguments, by prepending them with tilde, like so:
lastversion --only '~-po.-' https://github.com/lastversion-test-repos/autoscaler
The above will consider only releases tagged with -pod-, or -pov-, etc.
Use case: How to download the latest version of something¤
You can also use lastversion
to download assets/sources for the latest release.
Download the most recent Mautic source release:
lastversion download mautic/mautic
Customize downloaded filename (works only for sources, which is the default):
lastversion download mautic/mautic -o mautic.tar.gz
You can also directly fetch and extract the latest release's file into the current working directory
by using extract
command:
lastversion extract wordpress
You can have lastversion
output sources/assets URLs and have those downloaded by
something else:
wget $(lastversion --assets mautic/mautic)
This will download all assets of the newest stable Mautic, which are two zip files.
How this works: lastversion
outputs all asset URLs, each on a new line, and wget
is smart
enough to download each URL. Magic :)
For releases that have no assets added, it will download the source archive.
To always download the source, use --source
instead:
wget $(lastversion --source mautic/mautic)
Use case: Download specific asset under specified filename¤
If you want to download specific asset of the last version's release and save the downloaded file
under a desired name, combine -d
option (for download name) and --filter
for specifying assets
filter.
Example:
lastversion --pre Aircoookie/WLED --format assets --filter ESP32.bin -d ESP32.bin
Use case: Get the last version (betas are fine)¤
We consider the latest release is the one that is stable / not marked as beta.
If you think otherwise, then pass --pre
switch and if the latest version of repository is a
pre-release, then you'll get its version instead:
lastversion --pre mautic/mautic
#> 2.15.2b0
Use case: version of a specific branch¤
For some projects, there may be several stable releases available simultaneously, in different
branches. An obvious example is PHP. You can use --major
flag to specify the major release
version to match with, to help you find the latest stable release of a branch, like so:
lastversion php/php-src --major 7.2
This will give you current stable version of PHP 7.2.x, e.g. 7.2.28
.
Branch selector is easy to be specified after semicolon, and together with the search API, a clean invocation for the same would be:
lastversion php:7.2
The branch selector can also be used to get specific release details, e.g.:
lastversion php:7.2.33 --assets
Use case: releases with specific assets¤
Sometimes a project makes nice formal releases but delay in uploading assets for releases.
And you might be interested in specific asset type always.
Then you can make lastversion
consider as latest only the last release with specific asset name.
Easy with the --having-asset
switch:
lastversion telegramdesktop/tdesktop --having-asset "Linux 64 bit: Binary"
The argument value to --having-asset
can be made as regular expression. For this, prepend it
with tilde sign. E.g. to get releases with macOS installers:
lastversion telegramdesktop/tdesktop --having-asset "~\.dmg$"
You can pass no value to --having-asset
at all. Then lastversion
will only return the latest
release which has any assets added to it:
lastversion telegramdesktop/tdesktop --having-asset
Use case: version of an operating system¤
The operating systems are usually not versioned through GitHub releases or such. It is a challenge to get the last stable version of an OS other than from its website, or other announcement channels.
An easy compromise that lastversion
does about this, is hard coding well-known OS names, and using
Wikipedia behind the scenes:
lastversion rocky #> 8.4
lastversion windows #> 10.0.19043.1081
lastversion ios #> 14.6
You can supply a fully qualified URL to a Wikipedia page for an OS/software project to get version from there, e.g.:
lastversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Linux #> 8.4
Special use case: NGINX stable vs mainline branch version¤
lastversion https://nginx.org --major stable #> 1.16.1
lastversion https://nginx.org --major mainline #> 1.17.9
Behind the scenes, this checks with hg.nginx.org
which is a Mercurial web repo.
Those are supported as well, e.g.
lastversion https://hg.example.com/project/
Mercurial repositories are rather rare these days, but support has been added primarily for NGINX.
Special use case: find the release of a PyPI project¤
Most Python libraries/apps are hosted on PyPI. To check versions of a project on PyPI, you can use:
lastversion https://pypi.org/project/requests/
If you prefer using a shorter repo name, ensure --at pip
switch, like so:
lastversion requests --at pip
Install an RPM asset¤
If a project provides .rpm
assets and your system has yum
or dnf
, you can install the project's
RPM directly, like so:
sudo lastversion install mailspring
This finds MailSpring, gets its latest release info,
filters assets for .rpm
and passes it to yum
/ dnf
.
You can even set up an auto-updater cron job which will ensure you are on the latest version of a package, like so:
@daily /usr/bin/lastversion install mailspring -y 2>/dev/null
If the Mailspring GitHub repo posts a release with newer .rpm
, then it will be automatically
installed, making sure you are running the latest and greatest Mailspring version.
You'll even get an email alert after update (standard cron feature).
Needless to say, more often than not, such RPM packages have no idea about all potentially missing
dependencies. Thus, only use lastversion install ...
if the software is missing from the base
yum
repositories.
Install an AppImage¤
If a project provides .AppImage
, you can install those directly using lastversion
.
The AppImage
is self-contained Linux executable file. What lastversion
does for you, is fetch
the latest release's AppImage
, installs it under ~/Applications/<app>
and makes it executable.
Just run:
lastversion install fluent-reader
Test version parser¤
The test
command can be used for troubleshooting or simply well formatting a string with version:
lastversion test 'blah-1.2.3-devel' # > 1.2.3.dev0
lastversion test '1.2.x' # > False (no clear version)
lastversion test '1.2.3-rc1' # > 1.2.3rc1
Scripting with lastversion
in bash
¤
Semantic versioning support¤
Sometimes you only want to check updates for a specific semantic versioning level.
Does a project have a new minor release? Does a project have a new major release?
To print just the necessary semantic versioning base, use --sem
option.
Acceptable values are major
, minor
, and patch
.
lastversion wordpress --sem major
#> 5
lastversion wordpress --sem minor
#> 5.9
lastversion wordpress --sem patch
#> 5.9.3
The value --sem patch
can be used to normalize a given result to semantic versioning,
if a project doesn't follow the semantics strictly. E.g. sometimes WordPress would publish an x.y
release while it's implicitly x.y.0. So let's say WordPress released "5.10":
lastversion wordpress --sem patch
#> 5.10.0
Format any version string¤
Say you ran mysqld --version
and got this output:
mysqld Ver 5.6.51-91.0 for Linux on x86_64 (Percona Server (GPL), Release 91.0, Revision b59139e)
This is rather hard to parse in bash if you want to just extract the major MySQL server version.
lastversion
can easily parse out and give the desired information based on desired semantic
versioning level:
lastversion --sem major format "mysqld Ver 5.6.51-91.0 for Linux on x86_64 (Percona Server (GPL) , Release 91.0, Revision b59139e)"
#> 5
Compare arbitrary versions¤
Use lastversion
for easy comparison of versions on the command line.
Compare two versions, the command will output the highest version:
lastversion 1.2.3 -gt 1.2.4
#> 1.2.4
See the exit codes below, to find whether the first argument is a higher version, or the second.
The --sem
option described earlier will affect both what's being printed and what semantic
versioning base level is being compared, thus the result.
Check for NEW release¤
When you're building some upstream package, and you did this before, there is a known "last build" version. Automatic builds become easy with:
CURRENTLY_BUILT_VER=1.2.3 # stored somewhere, e.g. spec file in my case
LAST_VER=$(lastversion repo/owner -gt ${CURRENTLY_BUILT_VER})
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
# LAST_VER is newer, update and trigger build
# ....
fi
Here, the -gt
is actually a switch passed to lastversion
, which acts in a similar fashion to
-gt
comparison in bash.
There is more to it if you want to make this reliable.
See my ranting on
RPM auto-builds with lastversion
Check if there is a newer kernel for your Linux machine¤
LATEST_KERNEL=$(lastversion linux -gt $(uname -r | cut -d '-' -f 1))
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
echo "I better update my kernel now, because ${LATEST_KERNEL} is there"
else
echo "My kernel is latest and greatest."
fi
Exit Status codes¤
Exit status codes are the usual means of communicating a command's execution success or failure.
So lastversion
follows this: successful command returns 0
while anything else is an error of
some kind.
For example, when the latest stable release version if found, 0
is returned.
0
is also returned for -gt
comparison when leftmost argument is newer than rightmost argument.
Exit status code 1
is returned for cases like no release tag existing for repository at all, or
repository does not exist.
Exit status code 2
is returned for -gt
version comparison negative lookup, that is when rightmost argument is newer
than leftmost argument.
Exit status code 3
is returned when filtering assets of last release yields empty URL set
(no match)
Tips¤
Getting the latest version is heavy on the API, because GitHub does not allow to fetch tags in chronological order, and some repositories switch from one version format to another, so we can't just consider the highest version to be latest. We have to fetch every tag's commit date, and see if it's actually more recent. Thus, it's slower with larger repositories, which have potentially a lot of tags.
Thus, lastversion
makes use of caching API response to be fast and light on GitHub API,
It does conditional ETag validation, which, as per GitHub API will not count towards rate limit.
The cache is stored in ~/.cache/lastversion
on Linux systems.
It is much recommended to set up your GitHub API token.
Bare API token is enough, you may deselect all permissions.
You can then increase your rate limit by adding the following ~/.bashrc
file:
export GITHUB_API_TOKEN=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
You can use either GITHUB_API_TOKEN
or GITHUB_TOKEN
environment variable.
The former has priority.
For GitLab, you can use a Personal Access Token:
export GITLAB_PA_TOKEN=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Then run source ~/.bashrc
. After this, lastversion
will use it to get larger API calls allowance
from GitHub.
Usage in a Python module¤
You can use lastversion.has_update(...)
to find whether an update for existing version of
something is available, simply:
from lastversion import has_update
latest_version = has_update(repo="mautic/mautic", current_version='1.2.3')
if latest_version:
print(f'Newer Mautic version is available: {latest_version}')
else:
print('No update is available')
The lastversion.has_update(...)
function accepts any URL from a repository (or its short name
, e.g. owner/name
) and you should pass an existing/current version.
If you are checking version of a project on PyPi, supply an additional at='pip'
argument,
in order to avoid passing the full PyPI URI of a project, and remove ambiguity with GitHub hosted
projects. For example, checking for newer Requests
library:
from lastversion import has_update
latest_version = has_update(repo="requests", at='pip', current_version='1.2.3')
if latest_version:
print('Newer Requests library is available: {latest_version}')
else:
print('No update is available')
The has_update
function returns either:
- The Version object
False
if there is no newer version than the one given
Alternatively, invoke lastversion.latest(...)
function to get the latest version information
for a repo.
from lastversion import latest
from packaging import version
latest_mautic_version = latest("mautic/mautic", output_format='version', pre_ok=True)
print(f'Latest Mautic version: {latest_mautic_version}')
if latest_mautic_version >= version.parse('1.8.1'):
print('It is newer')
With output_format='version'
(the default), the function returns a
Version object, or
None
. So you can do things like above, namely version comparison, checking dev status, etc.
With output_format='dict'
, a dictionary returned with the latest release information, or False
.
The dictionary keys vary between different project locations (GitHub vs BitBucket, for example),
but are guaranteed to always have these keys:
version
: Version object, contains the found release version, e.g.1.2.3
source
: string, the identifier of the project source, e.g.github
, orgitlab
tag_date
: datetime object, the release date, e.g.2020-12-15 14:41:39
from
: string, contains fully qualified URL of the projecttag_name
: string, version control tag name corresponding to the release
The lastversion.latest
function accepts 3 arguments
repo
, in format of<owner>/<name>
, or any URL under this repository, e.g.https://github.com/dvershinin/lastversion/issues
format
, which accepts the same values as when you runlastversion
interactively, as well asdict
to return a dictionary as described abovepre_ok
, boolean for whether to include pre-releases as potential versionsat
, specifies project location when using one-word repo names, one ofgithub
,gitlab
,bitbucket
,pip
,hg
,sf
,website-feed
,local
Using in Continuous Integration¤
You can also use lastversion
directly in your GitHub action workflows,
with lastversion-action
.
Feature Requests and Enhancements¤
Only features that are essential to GitHub releases are prioritized. If your issue or suggested feature is outside the current focus, here's how you can help make it happen:
- Contribute: We encourage you to submit a pull request with your proposed changes or enhancement.
- Donate: If you'd like to see a feature developed but cannot contribute code, consider making a donation. Your donations help us allocate resources to work on additional features and improvements.
Sponsored Message¤
GetPageSpeed RPM Repository: Enhance your server performance with our NGINX modules and performance tools. Visit GetPageSpeed.com to learn more and subscribe for access.