We use the Artifactory to know which versions are available, we process the JSON there and store the builds IDs when they are available. These are the snippets we use, we can give you the URL of our version file one is in the apm-pipeline-library, @v1v Do we have some other file?
We also have the updated channels we use for the bolt clusters. It is a JSON file with the latest build we have tested

7.x versions available

NO_KPI_URL_PARAM="x-elastic-no-kpi=true"
curl -sSf "https://artifacts-api.elastic.co/v1/versions?${NO_KPI_URL_PARAM}" | jq '.aliases[]|select(.|startswith("7"))'

Two latest builds for 7.17

NO_KPI_URL_PARAM="x-elastic-no-kpi=true"
VERSION=7.17

curl -sSf "https://artifacts-api.elastic.co/v1/versions/${VERSION}/builds?${NO_KPI_URL_PARAM}"|jq '.builds[:2]'

8.x versions available

NO_KPI_URL_PARAM="x-elastic-no-kpi=true"
curl -sSf "https://artifacts-api.elastic.co/v1/versions?${NO_KPI_URL_PARAM}" | jq '.aliases[]|select(.|startswith("8"))'

Two latest builds for 8.14

NO_KPI_URL_PARAM="x-elastic-no-kpi=true"
VERSION=8.15

curl -sSf "https://artifacts-api.elastic.co/v1/versions/${VERSION}/builds?${NO_KPI_URL_PARAM}"|jq '.builds[:2]'

8 SNAPSHOT versions

NO_KPI_URL_PARAM="x-elastic-no-kpi=true"
curl -sSf "https://artifacts-api.elastic.co/v1/versions?${NO_KPI_URL_PARAM}" | jq '[.aliases[]|select(.|startswith("8"))|select(.|endswith("SNAPSHOT"))]'

No 8 SNAPSHOT versions

NO_KPI_URL_PARAM="x-elastic-no-kpi=true"
curl -sSf "https://artifacts-api.elastic.co/v1/versions?${NO_KPI_URL_PARAM}" | jq '[.aliases[]|select(.|startswith("8"))|select(.|endswith("SNAPSHOT")|not)]'

latest 8 version

curl -sSf "https://artifacts-api.elastic.co/v1/versions?${NO_KPI_URL_PARAM}" | jq '[.aliases[]|select(.|startswith("8"))|select(.|endswith("SNAPSHOT")|not)][-1:]' 

latest 8 SNAPSHOT version

curl -sSf "https://artifacts-api.elastic.co/v1/versions?${NO_KPI_URL_PARAM}" | jq '[.aliases[]|select(.|startswith("8"))|select(.|endswith("SNAPSHOT"))][-1:]' 

Do we have some other file?

Yes, there is a Google Bucket with the latest releases for 8.x and 7.x and the upcoming minor or patches releases:

• Current version in main: https://storage.googleapis.com/artifacts-api/releases/edge/main
• Current release for 8.x: https://storage.googleapis.com/artifacts-api/releases/current/8
• Current release for 7.x: https://storage.googleapis.com/artifacts-api/releases/current/7
• Next patch release for 8.x: https://storage.googleapis.com/artifacts-api/releases/next/patch-8
• Next patch release for 7.x: https://storage.googleapis.com/artifacts-api/releases/next/patch-7
• Next minor release for 8.x: https://storage.googleapis.com/artifacts-api/releases/next/minor-8

Those entries change based on the artifacts-api.elastic.co, it does some transformation to be able to use the aliases edge, next, current, patch and minor.

Regarding the build-id, there is another entry in the Google bucket to know the latest available snapshot for a release branch:

• https://storage.googleapis.com/artifacts-api/snapshots/``.json

<branch-name> can be main, 7.17, 8.14 and so on.

For instance:

curl https://storage.googleapis.com/artifacts-api/snapshots/8.14.json
{
  "start_time": "Thu, 25 Apr 2024 04:05:10 GMT",
  "release_branch": "8.14",
  "prefix": "",
  "end_time": "Thu, 25 Apr 2024 05:58:07 GMT",
  "manifest_version": "2.1.0",
  "version": "8.14.0-SNAPSHOT",
  "branch": "8.14",
  "build_id": "8.14.0-055b54fd",
  "build_duration_seconds": 6777
}

or

{
  "start_time": "Thu, 25 Apr 2024 02:02:24 GMT",
  "release_branch": "master",
  "prefix": "",
  "end_time": "Thu, 25 Apr 2024 04:01:35 GMT",
  "manifest_version": "2.1.0",
  "version": "8.15.0-SNAPSHOT",
  "branch": "master",
  "build_id": "8.15.0-eb13af64",
  "build_duration_seconds": 7151
}

This is handy since it stores the latest available snapshot for any release branch, while artifacts-api.elastic.co deletes any references to any branch with artefacts older than 30 days.

That's the reason we cannot query the latest snapshot for 8.9 in artifacts-api.elastic.co but we can using the Google bucket:

curl https://storage.googleapis.com/artifacts-api/snapshots/8.9.json 
{
  "start_time": "Tue, 29 Aug 2023 08:20:45 GMT",
  "release_branch": "8.9",
  "prefix": "",
  "end_time": "Tue, 29 Aug 2023 12:34:12 GMT",
  "manifest_version": "2.1.0",
  "version": "8.9.2-SNAPSHOT",
  "branch": "8.9",
  "build_id": "8.9.2-a804d52d",
  "build_duration_seconds": 15207
}