For production systems, we strongly suggest that you always get the latest stable release of the source code in either zip or tarball format from Github using the following link pattern:
https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/archive/refs/tags/v<release version>.tar.gz https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/archive/refs/tags/v<release version>.zip
For example for version 1.8.12 the link is the following: https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit/archive/refs/tags/v1.8.12.tar.gz
For anyone who aims to contribute to the project by testing or extending the code base, you can get the development version from our GIT repository:
Note that our master branch is where the development of Fluent Bit happens. Since it's a development version, expect issues when compiling or at run time.
We encourage everybody to help us testing every development version, at the end this is what will become stable.