# How can a script determine the latest Julia version and latest pre-release in CI?
**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-can-a-script-determine-the-latest-julia-version-and-latest-pre-release-in-ci/127446
**Category:** General Usage
**Tags:** question, ci
**Created:** [March 28, 2025, 10:22am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-can-a-script-determine-the-latest-julia-version-and-latest-pre-release-in-ci/127446 "2025-03-28T10:22:02Z")
**Posts on this page:** 6
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@ufechner7](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ufechner7)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2025, 10:22am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-can-a-script-determine-the-latest-julia-version-and-latest-pre-release-in-ci/127446/1 "2025-03-28T10:22:02Z")
How can I determine:
- the latest stable Julia version
- the latest Julia release
- the latest Julia pre-release
on github?
I can do:
```julia
ufechner@ufryzen:~$ juliaup list | grep release
release 1.11.4+0.x64.linux.gnu
release~x64 1.11.4+0.x64.linux.gnu
release~x86 1.11.4+0.x86.linux.gnu
```
which is already nice, but I don’t have the version number string yet.
I cannot do:
```julia
juliaup list | grep pre
```
This gives me only version 0.6 as pre-release.
---
### Author:  [@gdalle](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/gdalle)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2025, 11:42am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-can-a-script-determine-the-latest-julia-version-and-latest-pre-release-in-ci/127446/2 "2025-03-28T11:42:43Z")
Does this help?
> **[GitHub - julia-actions/setup-julia: This action sets up a Julia environment for use in...](https://github.com/julia-actions/setup-julia?tab=readme-ov-file#julia-versions)**
>
> This action sets up a Julia environment for use in actions by downloading a specified version of Julia and adding it to PATH.
---
### Author:  [@ufechner7](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ufechner7)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2025, 11:56am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-can-a-script-determine-the-latest-julia-version-and-latest-pre-release-in-ci/127446/3 "2025-03-28T11:56:33Z")
Thanks for the link. Unfortunately it doesn’t solve my problem. I want to test with the latest release and the latest pre-release, but often both are the same, and then I don’t want to run the same job twice.
So I need to test if the pre-release is the same as the release. There is no job yet that can do that, so I have to program that myself. But I can program that only if I found a reliable way to determine the version number both of the latest release and of the latest pre-release.
---
### Author:  [@GHTaarn](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/GHTaarn)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2025, 1:27pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-can-a-script-determine-the-latest-julia-version-and-latest-pre-release-in-ci/127446/4 "2025-03-28T13:27:23Z")
does this help?
[https://julialang-s3.julialang.org/bin/versions.json](https://julialang-s3.julialang.org/bin/versions.json)
---
### Author:  [@ufechner7](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ufechner7)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2025, 1:31pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-can-a-script-determine-the-latest-julia-version-and-latest-pre-release-in-ci/127446/5 "2025-03-28T13:31:22Z")
Not really. I do not know how to extract the version number of the latest Julia version and the latest pre release from the .json file.
Perplexity suggested:
```julia
echo "latest=$(jq -r '.latest.version' <<< "$versions")"
```
which does not work, the result is empty.
---
### Author:  [@GHTaarn](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/GHTaarn)
#### Post date: [March 28, 2025, 4:04pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-can-a-script-determine-the-latest-julia-version-and-latest-pre-release-in-ci/127446/6 "2025-03-28T16:04:08Z")
This seems to work right now:
```julia
using Downloads, JSON
j = Downloads.download("https://julialang-s3.julialang.org/bin/versions.json", IOBuffer()) |> seekstart |> JSON.parse
lateststable = (keys(j) |> filter(contains(r"^[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+$")) .|> VersionNumber |> sort)[end]
latestpre = (keys(j) |> filter(contains(r"^[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+-")) .|> VersionNumber |> sort)[end]
```