About releases

Releases are deployable software iterations you can package and make available for a wider audience to download and use.

Releases are based on Git tags, which mark a specific point in your repository's history. A tag date may be different than a release date since they can be created at different times. For more information about viewing your existing tags, see "Viewing your repository's releases and tags."

You can receive notifications when new releases are published in a repository without receiving notifications about other updates to the repository. For more information, see "Viewing your subscriptions."

Anyone with read access to a repository can view and compare releases, but only people with write permissions to a repository can manage releases. For more information, see "Managing releases in a repository."

You can manually create release notes while managing a release. Alternatively, you can automatically generate release notes from a default template, or customize your own release notes template. For more information, see "Automatically generated release notes."

When viewing the details for a release, the creation date for each release asset is shown next to the release asset.

GitHub will automatically include links to download a zip file and a tarball containing the contents of the repository at the point of the tag's creation.

You can also use the Releases API to gather information, such as the number of times people download a release asset. For more information, see "REST API endpoints for releases and release assets."