Daily builds of Positron are now available

[juliasilge]

If you are interested in keeping up with absolutely bleeding edge new features in Positron, then I have some good news for you! We now have an update channel that you can opt in to for access to our dailies:

The default for this update.positron.channel setting in Positron is "preleases", which will set you up to use our monthly stable builds. These monthly releases go through extensive vetting and testing before being made available. If you change the setting to "dailies", what can you expect?

• You will have an updated version of Positron available most days (instead of once a month). You'll see a notification in the bottom left gear ⚙️ prompting you to restart.
• These daily builds only go through automated testing before being made available, not our full QA process. If you consider yourself an adventurous early adopter, this may be a good fit for you!
• If some daily build happens to be entirely broken for you, the best step for you to take is to close Positron and install the latest monthly release.

Let us know if you have questions about using the update channel for dailies!

[JosephBARBIERDARNAL]

Pretty cool! Naive question: I guess users should install a minimum positron version for this feature to work?

[juliasilge]

If you install the version currently available at https://positron.posit.co/download, you should be able to opt in to the dailies.

[JosephBARBIERDARNAL]

Yes, that's what I assumed, I just wanted to know if people still had to do at least one last manual update to access it (not for me, that's why).

[ZhimingYe]

Since Positron has exited the beta stage, it now only releases monthly previews. However, the server I maintain for my team's working environment (which we access via SSH) is on an internal network and only supports limited access to global websites (Posit’s CDN may not be reachable). Previously, I had been tracking the GitHub releases page, syncing its remote assets to my local object storage, and replacing the download links on the remote SSH host with those from my local storage. This allowed me to keep the environment relatively up to date, as new versions of Positron often include timely bug fixes for issues our team members encounter during use.

I’m wondering if there is a static site similar to https://dailies.rstudio.com/ that would allow me to automate the process of retrieving updated URLs to use as download links for the remote SSH host. Thank you!

[juliasilge]

The CDN has metadata that you might be able to use, with a format like this:

https://cdn.posit.co/positron/${update_channel}/${platform}/${arch}/${release_json}

For example, you can do this to get the latest release:

$ curl https://cdn.posit.co/positron/releases/deb/x86_64/releases.json
{
  "version": "2025.07.0-204",
  "pub_date": "2025-07-02 15:07:13 UTC",
  "name": "2025.07.0-204",
  "url": "https://cdn.posit.co/positron/releases/deb/x86_64/Positron-2025.07.0-204-x64.deb",
  "commit": "03ae7a5393c776bb24c23d2aa6a6bfbba90cbc5e",
  "sha256hash": "7f6ecb0b8f925e793278fc3f7f0f2bf4962c390295a088859007adfd0b706cd8"
}

Could you then use that version to construct the REH URL? i.e. https://cdn.posit.co/positron/releases/reh/x86_64/positron-reh-linux-x64-2025.07.0-204.tar.gz? I don't believe we currently make metadata JSON for the REH builds since they don't auto-update and they have to match exactly the version of the desktop Positron. If this wouldn't work for you, can you open a feature request for what you would need to see in some metadata at the CDN for your use case?

[ZhimingYe]

That's enough, thanks!