A Handy Way to Browse Positron Daily Builds

[kv9898]

If you’ve been experimenting with Positron, you’ll know that the official website currently only provides the latest release builds — great for stability, not so great for those of us who like living a little dangerously.

For many users, the fun stuff often shows up in the daily builds: new features, bug fixes, experiments… and the occasional “why does X no longer work?” moment. Positron also auto-updates to the newest daily, which is convenient — until today’s build introduces a regression and you suddenly want to go back in time.

Reverting isn’t always straightforward, especially since old dailies aren’t easily discoverable.

So I built this repo:
👉 https://github.com/kv9898/fetch-positron-daily

It contains a small bot that runs every day and fetches download links for the latest ~30 daily builds across all desktop platforms (Windows System/User, macOS ARM/x64, Linux Deb/Ubuntu/RHEL, etc.).

That way, you can:

• Compare versions and cherry-pick the most desired version
• Roll back to a previous daily instantly when today’s one misbehaves

In short: you get a simple page listing recent dailies with all download links, so you can pick exactly the build you want — no scavenger hunt required.

If you’ve got ideas for improvements, PRs and issues are very welcome!

[timtmok]

Nice! Thank you for doing this. If you also want a different way of looking up past versions (e.g. the bot missed a build), the build creates tags on the repo for each successful daily build. I mention this because there may be more than one build per day.

[kv9898]

Yesss (just realised 2 builds came out just now)! My current implementation screens Positron's repo tags (e.g. 2025.12.0-166) and verify if the Windows installer exists. (I especially check for Windows because I think there was a change to the name of the binary?) Are they the same tags as the ones you mentioned?

[timtmok]

Yes, those are the tags. It actually gets tagged after the Windows and Mac installers have been built (not sure why Linux isn't included as a requirement). You might need to wait 10-20 minutes for the binaries to get uploaded so that might cause an installer check to fail. But yes, the Windows installer names changed a couple of months ago when arm64 builds were added.

Once you do have the version number, you can construct this url https://cdn.posit.co/positron/dailies/checksums/positron-2025.12.0-166-checksums.json to check for existence as that will be available once the binaries have been uploaded. It will also give you the filenames in case they change in the future as well as the file checksums.

[kv9898]

Thank you so much! That's super helpful!