Getting latest version of Roundcube

Question

I am trying to display the latest version of roundcube. I get the results I want with

curl https://api.github.com/repos/roundcube/roundcubemail/releases | grep tag_name | grep -o "1.2.[0-9]\{1,\}" | sort -n | tail -1

I am trying to work this into a RC plugin, so I have to do this via php and it is not working as I would hope.

<?php
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array(
$ch, array(
CURLOPT_URL => 'https://api.github.com/repos/roundcube/roundcubemail/releases',
CURLOPT_USERAGENT => $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => 'grep tag_name | grep -o \"1.2.[0-9]\{1,\}\" | sort -n | tail -1'));

$output = curl_exec($ch);
echo $output;
?>

It returns

{ "message": "Not Found", "documentation_url": "https://developer.github.com/v3" } 1

Any help is appreciated. Thanks

Answer 1

You are setting CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS to grep tag_name | grep -o \"1.2.[0-9]\{1,\}\" | sort -n | tail -1. This has the effect of making a HTTP POST request to the GitHub Releases API, and sending that shell command as the POST data.

There are many problems with your approach:

1. The /repos/:owner/:repo/releases endpoint only accepts HTTP GET requests. Sending a POST request is not supported and causes an error message.
2. The grep... commands are not executed by the GitHub servers. They are Unix commands that are executed on your local machine. Therefore, there is no reason to send them as part of the API request.
3. You should not be using grep and friends to parse the output. The response from the GitHub API is in a standard format called JSON. You should use json_decode instead, which will be faster and more reliable than regular expressions. You can replace the sort command with PHP sorting functions.
4. If you only want the latest release, you should use the /repos/:owner/:repo/releases/latest endpoint instead. Since this only returns one release, you do not need to sort, and you can access the tag_name attribute directly.

5. You are missing several important options:

   • CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true, to have curl_exec actually return the response.
   • CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST => false and CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => false, to disable HTTPS certificate checking, which is annoying to deal with.

Here is how I would implement it:

<?php
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($ch, array(
    CURLOPT_URL => 'https://api.github.com/repos/roundcube/roundcubemail/releases/latest',
    CURLOPT_USERAGENT => $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
    CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST => false,
    CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => false
));
$output = json_decode(curl_exec($ch))->tag_name;
echo $output;