It would be cool if the script was able to convert the octet-stream ZIP to a binary ZIP file in memory and extract from that without creating any temporary ZIP file on disk.

https://gist.github.com/f3l3gy/0e89dde158dde024959e36e915abf6bd

Some fixes:

09 [Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12
10 $tag = (Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $releases -UseBasicParsing | ConvertFrom-Json)[0].tag_name

17 [Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12
18 Invoke-WebRequest $download -Out $zip

Did a small refactor on the code:
https://gist.github.com/Splaxi/fe168eaa91eb8fb8d62eba21736dc88a

It supports prerelease (like yours) and also latest release (non-prerelease). It supports inner folder extraction also. It has another logic around handling the extract and destination paths.

It was just brought to my attention that this works: https://github.com/$repo/releases/latest/download/$file which is apparently here (although, I'd never find that without knowing the answer first ;)

@andyneff You are right. curl.exe -LO https://github.com/%repo%/releases/latest/download/%file% should be the preferred way for downloading the latest release these days (curl is available by default on Windows and it's faster than PowerShell's Invoke-WebRequest, so I'd recommend using it instead).

@andyneff You are right. curl.exe -LO https://github.com/%repo%/releases/latest/download/%file% should be the preferred way for downloading the latest release these days (curl is available by default on Windows and it's faster than PowerShell's Invoke-WebRequest, so I'd recommend using it instead).

Invoke-WebRequest is fine to be used with PowerShell Core. In older versions you have to use it with $progressPreference = 'silentlyContinue' , otherwise it will be very slow.