Show HN: Lastversion – CLI tool to get the latest stable version of any project

If you package software or maintain automated builds, you know the drill. You need the latest stable version of some upstream project, and you'd think it's a simple API call. It isn't.

Release tags are wildly inconsistent. Some projects tag `v1.2.3`, others do `release-1.2.3-final`. Quite a few forget to mark their release candidates as pre-releases on GitHub, so the API happily returns a beta as "the latest release". And then there are projects that switch versioning schemes entirely mid-history, going from `v20150121` to `v2.0.1`.

I deal with RPM packaging, so I hit this constantly. Every upstream project required its own script. So I wrote `lastversion` to handle the mess, and it's been in production use for about 7 years now.

  $ lastversion nginx/nginx
  1.26.3

  $ lastversion php/php-src --major 8.2
  8.2.27

  $ lastversion format "mysqld  Ver 5.6.51-91.0 for Linux"
  5.6.51

  $ lastversion rocky
  9.5

That last one pulls Rocky Linux's version from Wikipedia — not everything has a GitHub repo. `lastversion` works with GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, PyPI, Mercurial, SourceForge, WordPress plugin directory, RSS feeds, Helm charts, and a few others.

The version parsing was the tricky part. Standard PEP 440 doesn't handle real-world formats like Java's `8u462-b08` or OpenSSL's `1.1.1b`, so I extended it. There's also heuristic detection for misfiled betas — when the micro version is suspiciously high (≥90) and it's not a date-based scheme, it's likely a pre-release.

You can also `lastversion download`, `extract`, or `install` releases directly. For CI scripts, the `-gt` flag gives you a non-zero exit code if no newer version exists. And if you maintain RPM specs, `lastversion update-spec nginx.spec` will update the version for you.

`pip install lastversion`. BSD licensed, ~400 GitHub stars.