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How-to: upgrade the CLI to the latest released version from the terminal

This is a worked task for keeping rp itself current. The reference page (rp doc upgrade) documents the single flag; this page shows the two supported invocations and the environment override.

Goal: update the installed rp — whether from main's latest release or a pinned tag — straight from the terminal, without cloning the repository.

Steps

  1. Upgrade to the latest released version. This re-fetches the installer from the configured upgrade repository and re-runs it in place:

$ rp upgrade

The command prints the current and target version, then re-downloads install.sh and executes it. There is no preview or confirmation step — it runs immediately.

  1. (Optional) Pin to a specific tagged release instead of latest. Append --version with a semantic version:

$ rp upgrade --version 1.2.3

This fetches that tag's own install.sh and runs it against that tag's payload, so a downgrade behaves identically to an upgrade.

Notes

  • The install is replaced wholesale: the installer re-extracts rp into ~/.rp and refreshes the /usr/local/bin/rp symlink. Because the whole install is rewritten, nothing needs refreshing by hand afterwards.
  • The symlink refresh may prompt for sudo; run the command in a session that can grant it.
  • rp upgrade requires curl (to fetch the installer), bash (to run it), and tar plus a sha256sum/shasum checksum tool (to unpack and verify the payload). It does not require git — the installer is pulled from raw.githubusercontent.com.
  • The source repository defaults to objctp/runpod-cli. Override it by exporting RP_UPGRADE_REPO (e.g. export RP_UPGRADE_REPO=your-org/your-fork) before running rp upgrade. Note the override only redirects where install.sh is fetched from; the fetched installer hardcodes its own payload repository, so a fork must also edit the repo variable inside its install.sh to serve its own tarballs.
  • The only accepted options are --version <x.y.z> and --help. There is no --check, --yes, or --force flag.
  • rp checks for a newer release automatically once per day (cached under $RP_CONFIG_HOME) and prints a short notice when one exists — naming the right command for your install method (rp upgrade, npm update -g runpod-cli, or brew upgrade runpod-cli). Set RP_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 to silence it.