How do I download a tarball from GitHub using cURL?

You can also use wget to »untar it inline«. Simply specify stdout as the output file (-O -):

wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/pinard/Pymacs/tarball/v0.24-beta2 -O - | tar xz

Use the -L option to follow redirects:

curl -L https://github.com/pinard/Pymacs/tarball/v0.24-beta2 | tar zx

The modernized way of doing this is:

curl -sL https://github.com/user-or-org/repo/archive/sha1-or-ref.tar.gz | tar xz

Replace user-or-org, repo, and sha1-or-ref accordingly.

If you want a zip file instead of a tarball, specify .zip instead of .tar.gz suffix.

You can also retrieve the archive of a private repo, by specifying -u token:x-oauth-basic option to curl. Replace token with a personal access token.

All the other solutions require specifying a release/version number which obviously breaks automation.

This solution- currently tested and known to work with Github API v3- however can be used programmatically to grab the LATEST release without specifying any tag or release number and un-TARs the binary to an arbitrary name you specify in switch --one-top-level="pi-ap". Just swap-out user f1linux and repo pi-ap in below example with your own details and Bob's your uncle:

curl -L https://api.github.com/repos/f1linux/pi-ap/tarball | tar xzvf - --one-top-level="pi-ap" --strip-components 1