cURL-ing GitHub Release Artifacts

The following content was published on my omg.lol Weblog on April 16th, 2025.

I've spent a bunch of time recently in proxmox weaving in and out of fresh VMs. Unfortunately, my editor of choice is Helix, which doesn't have the privilege of shipping with Debian and needs to be installed manually. This has resulted in the unprecedented event of memorizing what a couple of the cURL flags actually do, so I figured I'd pass that knowledge on.

Want to get a file from GitHub? Here's what you do:

curl -OL "<paste your url here>"

The two mysterious flags are important. I'm in enough strange places on the internet that I've started referring to them as the Office Lady flags. Here's what they do:

And that's all you need to know! At least, that's all I've needed to know so far. You can check the man page for cURL should my hubris befall you.

Oh, and if that artifact you installed was a .deb? apt install ./<your deb filename here>, with emphasis on the ./ and maybe a bit of sudo, depending on who you're running the command as. Good luck!