ASSET name for linux-amd64 download

[harisund (Hari Sundararajan)]

I am looking at this Install — Caddy Documentation

It says I should be able to do this -

curl -OL "https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/releases/latest/download/ASSET"

or
wget "https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/releases/latest/download/ASSET"

What is the ‘ASSET’ name for linux-amd64 ?

[francislavoie]

From the docs:

You can download Caddy from GitHub, where new releases are immediately published.

Replace ASSET with the filename for your platform.

Visit the GitHub page, scroll down a bit, and you’ll see all the files for download.

[harisund (Hari Sundararajan)]

I get that. The problem is, that requires me to know that the “latest” is 2.0.0

The docs specifically give out a curl and wget command. I believe the documentation is wrong and needs to be fixed.

No form of the curl or wget command can be used to download the latest.

Github allows the concept of downloading the latest tagged release but I think that works if you only have 1 asset file published. In this case, since multiple asset files are published, I think the documentation is wrong. The “using curl” and “using wget” portions must be removed

[matt (Matt Holt)]

@harisund

No form of the curl or wget command can be used to download the latest.

That’s not true:

$ curl -OL "https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/releases/latest/download/caddy_2.0.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz"
% Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100   158  100   158    0     0    392      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--   392
100   641  100   641    0     0   1050      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  625k
100 11.4M  100 11.4M    0     0  1364k      0  0:00:08  0:00:08 --:--:-- 1699k
  
$ ls -l caddy_2.0.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz 
-rw-r--r--  1 matt  staff  11968924 May 19 12:04 caddy_2.0.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz

The documentation is correct. Just replace ASSET with the filename.

[harisund (Hari Sundararajan)]

ah ok. I was actually trying combinations of caddy_latest_linux_amd64.tar.gz, latest_linux_amd64.tar.gz etc.

What I had in mind was a way to simply download the latest, without actually knowing the version of the latest. In your curl for instance, you have to “know” ahead of time that 2.0.0 is indeed the latest in order to be able to download that. If you already know that, you can simply use the https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/releases/download/v2.0.0/caddy_2.0.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz URL instead of the https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/releases/latest/download/_____ form.

I guess you could still use api.github.com to get the version number of the latest.

Thanks for the response!

[francislavoie]

We’ll eventually have a build server which will make that easier, but for now we recommend either using a package repo (apt for debian/ubuntu, or Fedora COPR for fedora/centos) which will keep you updated, if you need auto-updates. Or you can do like you suggest and use the github API

[matt (Matt Holt)]

Glad it worked for you!

Just so you know, “always downloading the latest” blindly (into production) is never a good idea.

Francis is right, we’ll probably eventually have a public API that lets you get version information. But this method of downloading Caddy (by using curl from GitHub releases) is just a command-line equivalent of using your browser to click the download link. It’s not intended for rolling installs on production systems. For that, use a proper package manager.