Upload binary files to an existing release

[AntonioFasano]

I would like to a upload binary file to an existing release on GitHub, using the API published here.

developer.github.com/v3/repos/releases

Is it possible to upload a binary with a gh() POST?

In the meantime, I have tried with the R curl package. Assuming RELEASEID is the release ID to upload to, I might use:

library(curl)
h=new_handle()
handle_setheaders(h, Authorization="token XXXXX",
                               "Content-Type" = "application/x-dosexec",
                               "User-Agent" = "curl")

handle_setform(h, app=form_file("app.exe", "application/x-dosexec"))
url="https://uploads.github.com/repos/:OWNER/:REPO/releases/:RELEASEID/assets?name=app.exe"
curl_fetch_memory(url, handle=h)

The upload appears to succeed, but, when I download the file app.exe, it is corrupted.
I do not experience problems with other MIME types, e.g. PDFs.
Also, using curl.exe from the shell, app.exe does not break.

[gaborcsardi]

Yes, this is somewhat cumbersome in gh, but possible, nevertheless. It goes like this:

library(gh)

## Get a list of releases
## https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/releases/#list-releases-for-a-repository

rels <- gh(
  "/repos/:owner/:repo/releases",
  owner = "gh-testing",
  repo = "myrepo"
)

## Get a single release
## https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/releases/#get-a-single-release

rel <- gh(
  "/repos/:owner/:repo/releases/:id",
  owner = "gh-testing",
  repo = "myrepo",
  id = rels[[1]]$id
)

## Extract the upload url, we don't support URI templates (yet),
## so you need to handle the {} part manually.

upload_url <- gsub("\\{[^\\}]+}", "", rel$upload_url)

## Upload a file
## https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/releases/#upload-a-release-asset

cat("This will be uploaded\n", file = "asset.txt")

gh(
  paste0("POST ", upload_url, "?name=asset.txt"),
  readBin("asset.txt", raw(), file.info("asset.txt")$size),
  .send_headers = c("Content-Type" = "text/plain")
)

[AntonioFasano]

Unfortunately, I experience the same problems.
The upload appears to succeed, but, when I download the binary file, it is corrupted.

I tried to upload the binary with the following MIME types:

• application/x-dosexec,
• application/octet-stream,
• text/plain.

With my code I was able to upload and open a PDF using the MIME type application/pdf; now the PDF download results in a corrupted file too.

Just like before, the size of the upload shown in GitHub and downloaded is larger: my test 93K binary increases to 128K. file.info correctly reports the size anyway.

Not really important, but for the sake of reproducibility, I uploaded to a draft release.
I am using x64 Windows 10 .

[gaborcsardi]

It seems that the exe file is encoded (probably base64 or sg similar), and it is not decoded at the server.

What's your curl.exe command line?

[AntonioFasano]

Using MSYS2 zsh:

upload=$(echo $upload | cut -d "\"" -f4 | cut -d "{" -f1)
upload="$upload?name=$theAsset"
succ=$(curl -H "Authorization: token $GITHUB_PAT" \
     -H "Content-Type: $(file -b --mime-type $theAsset)" \
     --data-binary @$theAsset $upload)

where:

$(file -b --mime-type $theAsset)

gives application/x-dosexec

Note that I have tried with a number of different test files.
As a small reference file, I used DriverView.exe binary in driverview-x64.zip from NirSoft.

[gaborcsardi]

Finally this is now fixed. E.g.

binary <- "~/Downloads/clipboard.exe"

gh(
  paste0("POST https://uploads.github.com/repos/gaborcsardi/playground/releases/233390/assets",
         "?name=clipboard.exe"),
  readBin(binary, raw(), file.info(binary)$size),
  .send_headers = c("Content-Type" = "application/vnd.microsoft.portable-executable")
)

[AntonioFasano]

Finally I was able to check your code. I confirm it works for me too.
Also, by inspecting gh(), the naked version (based only on curl) is:

## Customise this with your OWNER/REPO, Release ID and binary 
binary <- "~/Downloads/clipboard.exe"
url <- "https://uploads.github.com/repos/gaborcsardi/playground/releases/233390/assets?name=clipboard.exe"
perstoken <- "XXXXX"
 
 
library(curl)
h <- new_handle()
handle_setopt(h, .list = list(
                     post=TRUE, postfieldsize= file.info(binary)$size, 
                     postfields= readBin(binary, raw(), file.info(binary)$size)))
 
handle_setheaders(h, Authorization=paste0("token ", perstoken),
                  "Content-Type" = "application/x-dosexec")
 
req <- curl_fetch_memory(url, handle = h)

So it seems that handle_setform() should be avoided in favour of manually loading the file as a post field via readBin().
One can enrich the headers with the "User-Agent", "Accept" = "application/vnd.github.v3+json" or use
application/vnd.microsoft.portable-executable as content type.

R code was executed in Linux and the download test was executed in Windows.