kali-bleeding-edge is the name of a Kali repository that you can enable in your APT configuration to have access to packages built with the latest version of the source code found in the upstream git repository.

With over 300 tools in our repository, it’s close to impossible for us to keep every tool updated to their latest git version all the time - it’s already hard to do with official releases. However there are certainly cases where you really want the latest version. Consider this:

You have an audit tomorrow, and you’re getting your tools ready. You boot Kali Linux up, run sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade to make sure that you are running the latest stable versions of $your_favorite_tool. After the update, you notice that it was updated to last week’s version. However, in the past week, some pretty awesome updates were added to the git repository of $your_favorite_tool, and you really need those new features for the upcoming assessment. What do you do?

You can git clone the upstream repository in your home directory and work from there but then you lose any integration with Kali. You also have to take care of dependencies manually. No, the smartest solution is to rely on the tireless work of our Kali Bot that constantly crunches upstream git repository to populate our kali-bleeding-edge repository.

You’re an avid user of $your_favorite_tool and you have found some bug. As a good open source citizen, you checked the upstream project on GitHub, saw that the bug was not yet reported and you sent a detailed report on how to reproduce the issue.

Thanks to this, the upstream developer identified the problem, committed a possible fix and asked you to verify whether the problem is fixed with the latest git version.

You like the tool and the open-source philosophy, but you’re not a developer and don’t really want to build a git version of the tool just for this.

Thankfully, you remember the kali-bleeding-edge repository and after a quick check on pkg.kali.org you notice that the Kali bot already prepared an updated package. You quickly install it and reply to the upstream developer with the desired confirmation (or further information).

Remember that it’s called “Kali bleeding edge” for a reason. While the poor Kali bot does its best, its AI is not always smart enough to detect new dependencies, backward incompatible changes, and any other instructions left by the upstream developer in the README. So while it will usually manage to build some package, there’s no guaranty that the updated package will work.

Some upstream developers deliberately break their tool while they are working on some refactoring, or other major changes. They recommend their users to use only the official releases. In that case, the kali-bleeding-edge package will be useless if not actively harmful (the non-finished code could for example break some of the data managed by the tool).

Thus it’s a good idea to have a look at the changes that landed in the upstream git repository before deciding to upgrade a package to its kali-bleeding-edge version.

Ok. You have been warned and you promised to use kali-bleeding-edge in a reasonable way. How do you enable that repository? Easy:

kali@kali:~$ sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kali-bleeding-edge.list <<EOF
deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali-bleeding-edge main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
EOF
kali@kali:~$ sudo apt update
[...]

If you later want to disable the repository, it’s as easy as removing the file that you just created:

kali@kali:~$ sudo rm -f /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kali-bleeding-edge.list

Once the repository has been enabled, installing a package from kali-bleeding-edge is trivial with apt install <package>/kali-bleeding-edge. Here’s an example for gitleaks:

kali@kali:~$ sudo apt install gitleaks/kali-bleeding-edge
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Selected version '7.4.0+git20210412.1.6f5ad9d-0kali1~jan+nus1' (http.kali.org [amd64]) for 'gitleaks'
The following packages will be upgraded:
  gitleaks
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 283 not upgraded.
Need to get 2504 kB of archives.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://kali.download/kali kali-bleeding-edge/main amd64 gitleaks amd64 7.4.0+git20210412.1.6f5ad9d-0kali1~jan+nus1 [2504 kB]
Fetched 2504 kB in 2s (1257 kB/s)   
(Reading database ... 106991 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../gitleaks_7.4.0+git20210412.1.6f5ad9d-0kali1~jan+nus1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking gitleaks (7.4.0+git20210412.1.6f5ad9d-0kali1~jan+nus1) over (7.4.0-0kali1) ...
Setting up gitleaks (7.4.0+git20210412.1.6f5ad9d-0kali1~jan+nus1) ...
Processing triggers for kali-menu (2021.1.4) ...

Notice that the versioning scheme is a bit special. It starts with the version of the last upstream release and is followed by +git<date>.<number>.<commit> (where <date> is the date of the last upstream commit, <number> is a simple increment to cater for multiple versions in the same day, and <commit> is a short commit identifier). The Debian revision contains ~jan+nus<X> indicating that this is a “new uptsream snapshot” (nus) that was created by the Janitor Bot (which powers the Kali Bot). The tilde ensures that this sorts lower than any subsequent manual release of the same version.

Be aware that once you have installed a package from kali-bleeding-edge, apt will continue to fetch updates for that package from this repository for as long as the kali-bleeding-edge version is newer than the kali-rolling version.

If you want to go back to the stable version of the package, it works the same way, except that you set the target distribution to kali-rolling:

kali@kali:~$ $ sudo apt install gitleaks/kali-rolling
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Selected version '7.4.0-0kali1' (kali-rolling [amd64]) for 'gitleaks'
The following packages will be DOWNGRADED:
  gitleaks
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 downgraded, 0 to remove and 282 not upgraded.
Need to get 2504 kB of archives.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] 
Get:1 http://kali.download/kali kali-rolling/main amd64 gitleaks amd64 7.4.0-0kali1 [2504 kB]
Fetched 2504 kB in 2s (1060 kB/s)   
dpkg: warning: downgrading gitleaks from 7.4.0+git20210412.1.6f5ad9d-0kali1~jan+nus1 to 7.4.0-0kali1
(Reading database ... 106747 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../gitleaks_7.4.0-0kali1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking gitleaks (7.4.0-0kali1) over (7.4.0+git20210412.1.6f5ad9d-0kali1~jan+nus1) ...
Setting up gitleaks (7.4.0-0kali1) ...
Processing triggers for kali-menu (2021.1.4) ...