hub-release option for overwrite on attach

[DanySK]

The problem I'm trying to solve:

I'd like to be able to use hub to refresh the artifacts for some existing release.
This is especially useful in CI, I'd like to be able to create a release if non existing, then upload the file if they are not there already, or if they are different than the ones produced by the latest CI run.

How I imagine hub could expose this functionality:

hub release edit -a FILE --overwrite TAG

[mislav]

@DanySK Thanks for the feature request!

I'd like to be able to create a release if non existing

Is it an option for you to try to fetch an existing release first, then create one if missing?

if hub release show TAG >/dev/null; then
  hub release edit TAG -a FILE
else
  hub release create TAG -a FILE
fi

Existing release assets that match FILE will automatically be deleted when another is re-uploaded (even if they share the same contents).

[DanySK]

It does cover most of the cases indeed, yet if I need to re-upload a new version of the same file I can't do so.
For now I'm working this around using GH CLI and uploading using the --clobber option, so I'm using hub for creating the release if non existent and gh to upload files once created.

Is there any reason I should be consistent and use a single tool?

[mislav]

yet if I need to re-upload a new version of the same file I can't do so.

That sounds weird to me. If I'm reading hub's implementation of UploadReleaseAssets, it should delete all existing assets of the same name before uploading new ones. Therefore, hub release edit -a myfile.tgz should always work, even if the release already has myfile.tgz uploaded. Is this not your experience?

Any reason why you couldn't just use gh to cover your entire releasing flow?

[DanySK]

Here is a build where the command fails, my understanding was that the artifact had been uploaded already.

Anyway, no problem for me at using hub, gh, or mix both, as far as they are available on GitHub Actions.

[mislav]

@DanySK Thanks for that info. It appears that there is a bug with re-uploading assets in hub.

You may want to try gh instead. The gh release create command is similar to hub (still, read its help for flag name differences), but the command to upload the file would be:

gh release upload "$TAG" --clobber "$pdf"