How do I post a “release” on github?

Question

I have a few open source projects that I manage. I've been posting the .tar.gz releases for them to a directory on a webserver I run. I would like to post them to github. Is there a simple way to post the release and a signature for the release? My users aren't sophisticated enough to download the release with git; they want to download and install a .tar.gz file. Some of them may even want to verify the signature.

Answer 1

Other awesome option might be distributing from http://bintray.com. It integrates great with GitHub and gives you so much more when distributing binaries.

Answer 2

There are a few utilities to do what you need.

github_upload (Ruby) : https://github.com/github/upload
App::gh (Perl) : https://metacpan.org/module/App::gh::Command::Upload

Take your pick :)

Answer 3

Check out the GitHub Downloads section - no need for git at all to download files from there.

Answer 4

You can fetch a tarball of any tag like so:

https://github.com/visionmedia/express/tarball/2.5.4

Answer 5

One nice option github supports is tagging, and automatic tar.gz/zip creation based on those tags. It makes publishing releases really easy.

http://learn.github.com/p/tagging.html

On the commit/branch that you'd like to mark as a release, do

git tag <release_tag>

then

git push --tags

then, on github.com/user/repo/tags, you can see all tagged releases. You can link straight to those files, like in jimw's answer.

Answer 6

GitHub have just announced their new "GitHub Releases" feature, which sounds like exactly what you're after:

https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software