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Install via GitHub Releaseλ︎

Scripts can be used to automatically install software outside an operating system package management tools.

Compiled Binary releases and AppImages are commonly used to distribute software, building automatically via CI scripts and published as assets for a release on GitHub.

Scripts can be written to download these assets and place them in a suitable location in the execution path of the OS file system.

  • Shared for all users: /usr/local/bin
  • Only for current user: $HOME/.local/bin

NOTE: An account with administrative privelleges (root or user with sudo group) is required to install in /usr/local/bin

EXAMPLE "AppImage"λ︎

Download the AppImage binary for the latest release and save it in $HOME/.local/bin/

Script using curl to download the image and sed to transform text of the file name

curl -Lso ~/.local/bin/vifm \
    "https://github.com/vifm/vifm/releases/latest/download/vifm-v$(
        curl -Ls "https://api.github.com/repos/vifm/vifm/releases/latest" |
        sed -nE '/"tag_name":/s/.*"v*([^"]+)".*/\1/p'
    )-x86_64.AppImage" && chmod +x ~/.local/bin/vifm

Script using wget to download the AppImage and jq to manipulate the text of the file name.

wget -qO ~/.local/bin/vifm "$(
        wget -qO - "https://api.github.com/repos/vifm/vifm/releases/latest" |
        jq -r '.assets[] | select(.name|endswith(".AppImage")) | .browser_download_url'
    )" && chmod +x ~/.local/bin/vifm