📦 release-installer

Simple GitHub release installer.

A Node.js CLI to automatically download and install GitHub release binaries for your platform.
Helpful for installing non-npm tools.

Features

• Automatically detect OS and architecture
• Download & extract .tar.gz and .zip archives
• Configurable platform mappings, binary name, output dir
• Zero dependencies (requires Node.js 22+)
• Cross-platform

Installation

npm i release-installer

Usage

Basic Usage

# Install latest release
release-installer getzola/zola v0.20.0

# Install to specific directory
release-installer getzola/zola v0.20.0 --output=./bin

# Verbose output
release-installer getzola/zola v0.20.0 --verbose

CLI Options

Usage: release-installer <owner/repo> <version> [options]

Options:
  -b, --bin-name <name>       Name of the binary inside the archive
  -o, --output <dir>          Output directory (default: ./bin)
  -p, --platform-map <json>   JSON string or file path for platform mappings
  -f, --force                 Overwrite existing files
  -v, --verbose               Verbose logging
  -h, --help                  Show this help message

Platform Detection

The tool tries to detect your platform and architecture, then matches against common naming patterns:

• macOS: apple-darwin, macos, darwin
• Linux: linux-gnu, linux, unknown-linux
• Windows: windows-msvc, windows, win64, pc-windows

Architecture patterns:

• x64: x86_64, x64, amd64
• ARM64: aarch64, arm64

Examples

# Install Zola static site generator
release-installer getzola/zola v0.20.0

# Install specific binary name
release-installer owner/repo v1.0.0 --bin-name=custom-name

# Install with custom output directory
release-installer owner/repo v1.0.0 --output=./tools

# Use custom platform mappings
release-installer owner/repo v1.0.0 --platform-map='{"darwin-x64":"app-macos.tar.gz"}'

Development

npm install

npm run build

npm test