By Graham Ollis on 21 October 2022

Recently, GitHub changed their release pages such that the download links are no longer parseable without JavaScript. This unfortunately breaks the use of the plain Download negotiation plugin which picks the best plugins to download and parse the HTML to get the download links. The symptom is that your Alien which was previously working dies on a diagnostic like this:

no matching files in listing at /opt/perl-5.36.0/lib/site_perl/5.36.0/Alien/Build/Plugin/Core/Download.pm line 43.

Fortunately there is an alternative! The Download::GitHub plugin uses the GitHub API to get the releases. The TL;DR is that if you have something like this:

share {
  start_url 'https://github.com/org/repo/releases';
  plugin 'Download' => (
    filter  => qr/^v.*\.tar\.gz$/,
    version => qr/([0-9\.]+)/,
  );
  plugin Extract => 'tar.gz';
  ...
}

You instead want to do something like this:

share {
  plugin 'Download::GitHub' => (
    github_user => 'org',
    github_repo => 'repo',
  );
  ...
}

Note that you no longer need to specify a start_url or the Extract negotiation plugin, because the Download::GitHub plugin does that for you.

The Download::GitHub plugin has a number of advanced options, like fetching assets from the release or tarballs from arbitrary tags, so please review the documentation. Depending on how the alienized package is organized upstream you may have to adapt!