Proposal: Publish kubelogin-version.txt as a Release Asset to Avoid GitHub API Rate Limits

[AbhinavKU]

Background

Today, many automation pipelines retrieve the latest kubelogin version by querying the GitHub Releases API:
curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/Azure/kubelogin/releases/latest

However, GitHub enforces a rate limit of 60 unauthenticated requests per IP per hour. On shared or ephemeral build agents (especially CI/CD runners), this limit is reached very quickly, resulting in flaky builds and throttling failures.
This issue is commonly observed when multiple pipelines or jobs execute concurrently on the same agent pool.

Proposal

Publish a plain‑text file named: kubelogin-version.txt as a final artifact / asset attached to each GitHub Release, containing only the current version, for example:
v0.2.17
This file would then be downloadable from a stable URL such as: https://github.com/Azure/kubelogin/releases/latest/download/kubelogin-version.txt

Why This Helps

• No GitHub API usage
• No rate‑limiting issues
• Simple, fast
• Consistent with other Kubernetes tooling patterns

This mirrors how Kubernetes exposes its stable version via & allow kubelogin version in future

KUBECTL_VERSION=$(curl -fsSL https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt)
KUBELOGIN_VERSION=$(curl -fsSL https://github.com/Azure/kubelogin/releases/latest/download/kubelogin-version.txt)
az aks install-cli --client-version "${KUBECTL_VERSION}" --kubelogin-version "${KUBELOGIN_VERSION}"

Implementation Suggestions

• Generate kubelogin-version.txt automatically during the release workflow.
• Upload it as a release asset alongside existing binaries.
• Keep the file content strictly to the version string (no extra formatting).

[weinong]

#749