I was a vocal critic when GitHub discontinued their downloads product earlier this year. I work on open source projects with compiled binaries. GitHub's answer to distribution had been "Use S3" which I never found satisfactory.

As soon as they release an API, I'll be migrating all my projects over.

EDIT: Just added my first release. Super easy. https://github.com/hawkthorne/tmx2lua/releases

I just had a glimpse of a wonderful future where GitHub releases a payments system, packaging options, and suddenly becomes an ideal app store ecosystem.

It would be amazing to have public Releases from a private repo.

Here's a few examples of Releases:

    https://github.com/reactiveui/reactiveui/releases
    https://github.com/github/akavache/releases
    https://github.com/xpaulbettsx/splat/releases

While on the subject: does anyone know a software/service for automating software releases?

I usually perform these steps manually:

create a new tag, merge the “next” branch into the “master” branch, run “make dist” from a clean checkout, do a handful of sanity checks on the result, gpg-sign it, push it into a separate git repository for the website, archive the current docs in the website, update the website’s docs with the new docs, send posts to a mailing list, twitter, google+, update the changelog with a placeholder for the new version.

I realize not 100% of that is reasonably automatable, but is there anything which tries to tackle this problem?

Cool! We finally have downloads back!

It looks like this fails on tag names that have a slash in them.

Is there any way to add the release notes via a git commit? This is very nice, but it introduces further dependence on GitHub if something like that isn't possible. I suppose as long as there's API access someone could / will write an exporter, though. Anyway, great stuff either way!

This sounds like the death of SourceForge. (I know, you could argue that it's already dead, and also argue that it's very much alive)

Something like this was missing since they removed the uploads [1].

Basically a release bundle may not be exactly the same stuff you have in your source code repository. You may need to generate documentation, configure files, run setup.py sdist or whatever, so a release may not be exactly a snapshot of your git repo.

So this is perfect. Great feature GitHub, thanks!

It would be nice that tags != releases though, because I can think of scenarios where you may add a tag that is not meant to be a release (ie. security update, you may want to tag the commit with a CVE).

Also it would be great if you could just link or display the changelog, CHANGES or NEWS instead of writing a text describing the release. That's for projects that already have a release procedure, but for the rest this is HUGE change because GitHub just improved their project management! I love it!

[1]: https://github.com/blog/1302-goodbye-uploads

Here's an example in action:

https://github.com/git-tfs/git-tfs/releases

I like it a lot :) One question though: Will there be graphs about the number of downloads of those release files?

Excited for this! No more view raw and save.

Any news on if/when an API for this is coming? Could be super useful.

Excellent timing, just released a new version of MoonScript today, here it is in release form: https://github.com/leafo/moonscript/releases/v0.2.4

Goodbye SourceForge!

I see a problem with the current implementation: Releases are auto-generated from git tags. That means all tags you'll ever use on your repo will be auto-exposed as "release", even if the tag reads "dead_end_implementing_foo" or "before_major_rewrite". Tags are an implementors' tool, releases belong to product management. I want to be able to control my releases, so at least be able to delete auto-generated ones (without losing the git tag).

Wonderful, however the UI for upload sucks.

It requires Adobe Flash to upload and since I have blocked plugins by default, even if I enable the plugin after loading the page (through Firefox's click to play), it doesn't work.

GitHub, please: 1. don't make Adobe Flash necessary. 2. allow me to select a file through browser's File dialog. I don't like drag and drop.

Well done. This will work quite well with Vincent Driessen's "A Successful Git Branching Model." http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/ And with nearly all sensible git branching models for that matter.

Interesting that they launch this without API access and without adding it to the right hand nav. Sure, it's above your repo but I don't think that catches the eye enough and this is definitely meant to be a primary item users will be searching for.

What a great step for Github. I was impressed with Pages, and now they're providing what SourceForge granted the public with for so many years. Options for everyone. All without the sponsored hosting!

If you offer paid downloads from a private repository, preferably with an integrated licensing system, I'll be your first customer.

GitHub, thank you for this.

Also, you used to have ZIP and Tarball downloads in the past, can you please bring back the Tarball downloads?

Hmm, tried to draft a release. But after saving I'm only getting http 500 errors on the release page.

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wahoo!