When we talk about Github first thing that comes to our mind is the cloud version control feature, and we forget about all the other software development and distribution features we have available, for those who are not taking advantage of these features here there’s a quick reminder about two of the main feature you can use to organize and distribute your products:
Releases
This feature allows you to specify different release versions for your projects where you can specify all the information related to the specific release version as changelog, new features included, links, as well for uploading files associated to the release.
You can also specify extra info like the tag associated to the release, or mark it as a pre-release version.
It’s a very simple tool, but it’s great to organize and distribute your code, binary files or anything related to the specific release version.
Official documentation https://help.github.com/en/github/administering-a-repository/managing-releases-in-a-repository
If you want to go beyond this manual process, there’s more you can do to automate your release process and upload information from your CI server through the Github ‘Releases’ API,
https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/releases/
Packages
This can be confused with the Releases feature mentioned above, but this is a different feature available in Github.
Packages feature provides different repository types for a variety of package manager tools as Docker, NPM, NuGet, and others.
If you are a Docker guy, probably you are familiar with docker registry, and Github provides its own docker registry, where you can upload docker images associated to your GitHub project.
There’s a downside in this case, wherever you are trying to fetch these images, you need to include GitHub registry URL, otherwise the image won’t be found in the default registry (generally Docker hub)
Available repositories are NPM, RubyGems, Maven, Docker and NuGet at the moment, and these are free as long as you use public repositories, otherwise there’s a price for private repositories.
More info here https://github.com/features/packages
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