I’m working with a third-party library hosted on GitHub and I need to stay updated whenever they publish new versions. Is there a built-in way to receive alerts or notifications when maintainers create fresh releases for a specific repository?
I’ve seen that you can watch repositories for issues and pull requests, but that creates too much noise since I only care about actual version releases. I don’t want to get spammed with every bug report or feature request.
Some projects seem to create issues just to announce new releases, but that feels like a workaround rather than a proper solution. What’s the best approach to monitor release activity without getting overwhelmed by other repository updates?
theres a “releases only” option when u watch a repo! hit the watch button, pick “custom,” then just check releases. ive been doin this for months - works perfectly & u won’t get spammed with issues or PRs.
GitHub has RSS feeds for releases too - just add ‘/releases.atom’ to any repo URL and subscribe through your RSS reader. Works great if you’re already using RSS for other stuff. You could also use GitHub’s REST API to build your own monitoring setup. Poll the releases endpoint and send notifications to Slack or email. I’ve got a simple script that checks weekly and sends me a digest email - way cleaner than getting pinged for every single repo I’m watching.
I do something similar but add email filters on top. Set up GitHub to watch releases only (like Claire said), then create rules that automatically sort those notifications into a separate folder. You get a clean archive without inbox spam. Also check if the maintainers have a changelog or announcement channel - lots of popular projects use Twitter or Discord for releases. Those external channels often give you way better context about what actually changed versus the bare-bones GitHub notification.