How to use PowerShell script to download latest private GitHub release? - powershell

Question

I recently wrote a PowerShell script that downloads the latest release from a public repo and that works as intended. However, I want to change my script so it can access my private repo. Here is the code I have tried so far:
# Download latest release from GitHub
$credentials="myPersonalAccessToken"
$headers = New-Object "System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary[[String],[String]]"
$headers.Add("Authorization", "token $credentials")
$repo = "myUserName/MyPrivateReleaseRepo"
$file = "MyBinaries.zip"
$releases = "https://api.github.com/repos/$repo/releases"
Write-Host Determining latest release
$tag = (Invoke-WebRequest $releases -Headers $headers | ConvertFrom-Json)[0].tag_name
$download = "https://github.com/$repo/releases/download/$tag/$file"
$name = $file.Split(".")[0]
$zip = "$name-$tag.zip"
$dir = "$name-$tag"
Write-Host Dowloading latest release
Invoke-WebRequest $download -Headers $headers -Out $zip
Write-Host Extracting release files
Expand-Archive $zip -Force
# Cleaning up target dir
Remove-Item "C:\MyOutPutFolder\$name" -Recurse -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
# Moving from temp dir to target dir
Move-Item $dir\$name -Destination "C:\MyOutPutFolder\$name" -Force
# Removing temp files
Remove-Item $zip -Force
Remove-Item $dir -Recurse -Force
I get the following error only when using my private repo:
Invoke-WebRequest : The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found
At C:\Script\DownloadLatestGitHubRelease.ps1:25 char:1
+ Invoke-WebRequest $download -Headers $headers -Out $zip
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : InvalidOperation: (System.Net.HttpWebRequest:HttpWebRequest) [Invoke-WebRequest], WebException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : WebCmdletWebResponseException,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.InvokeWebRequestCommand
I've also tried providing bad credentials vs the correct credentials and got a "Bad Credentials" error when providing the incorrect ones as expected, so I believe I'm using the token correctly.
What am I doing wrong? Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Answer 1

Landed here trying to do the same thing. After digging into some bash scripts that do similar, I came up with this to do the download:
$token = "<your token from https://github.com/settings/tokens>"
$downloadFolder = "C:\temp";
$ownerSlashRepo = "owner/reop";
$tag = "latest";
$json = Invoke-Webrequest -Uri "https://api.github.com/repos/$ownerSlashRepo/releases/$tag" -Headers #{'Authorization'='token '+$token; 'Accept'='application/json'}
$release = $json.Content | ConvertFrom-Json
$release.assets | %{
$asset = $_;
$x = Invoke-Webrequest -Uri $($asset.url) -OutFile "$downloadFolder\$($asset.name)" -Headers #{'Authorization'='token '+$token; 'Accept'='application/octet-stream'}
}
This downloads every file from the release, but you could filter it to just download one as needed, something like:
$release.assets | ?{$_.name -eq 'foo.zip'} | %{
To answer your question, in the original code you're attempting to use the token with https://github.com. I tried similar at first and got similar results to what you describe. I think it is only good for https://api.github.com and the REST API. I also found I had to specify Accept:application/octet-stream when downloading the asset.