Ability to Watch a project but only for releases

[schrepfler]

I'm often interested in watching a project but I'm not really interested in all the conversations and issues it might have, I'm mostly interested in releases coming out. Would it be possible to have more options under the Watch project button?

[blackst0ne]

I suggest everyone to contact them also so that we get many +1s on their internal feature request list, which seems to be their way of prioritizing feature requests. It takes just a minute for a short message and can't hurt.

Done. :slightly_smiling_face:

[devenv]

Any response github? 2 years later :)

[iBobik]

Watch only security releases :-)

[vfeskov]

Hi peeps!

Since it's still not possible with GitHub, I continue developing Win A Beer and I just made some major changes that you might like.

A single email is being sent now with all the news combined 🎉

Subject of the email is dynamic and will contain as much info as possible

Also you can now reply to these emails and tell me how you love them :)

I worked a lot on documentation so if you feel like contributing you're more than welcome

About subscribing to major/minor/patch releases, I'm still thinking about how to do it, because there are releases like translation/20172701.01, 0.28.3.gfm.12, v5.2.0.beta2 and also releases happen in multiple major versions, e.g. there could be 5.1.1 release followed by 4.11.3, so it's really easy to mess it up. I think combining all new releases into one email kind of solves the same problem.

Next in pipeline:

• Optional authentication with GitHub
• Subscribing on daily basis instead of hourly
• Selecting specific days and hours when to send emails
• Browser extensions to watch right from a GitHub page. Server would still send emails allowing you to close the browser

Tell me what you think and support with a star ❤️

UPDATE 11 Jan: Now with GitHub Sign In:

UPDATE 30 Jan: Now you can get emails hourly OR daily!

UPDATE 11 Feb: Now you can pick repos that you starred:

Win A Beer

[MV10]

@vfeskov I'll use Win A Beer over Releaser based on the name alone!

[nlevnaut]

This would have been great in 2015, it would be great now too

[Naphier]

Still looking for this, 2 years later. Tons of comments and upvotes!

[marcellodesales]

Public snd Enterprise versions

[mikhailnov]

+1

[dantodev]

I use sibbell.com for this but it would be nice to have this as an official feature on github.com.

[durack1]

+1

[TPS]

Sibbell.com (open issue tracker @ https://github.com/sibbell/support/issues) is by far the best external service I've seen for this.

@dtkahl Thanks for the note! :bow:

[samangh]

Woul definetly find this useful.

[vfeskov]

Fellow seekers!

I made HUGE visual re-design and INTRO animation that shows dispute of two peeps and a BEER being WON:

Win A Beer

It's FREE and I'm working on more stuff but you can contribute too as it is completely OPEN-SOURCE

[anavathe]

+1 Not sure if this is something the GitHub product team looks at. It would be a huge win to be able to subscribe to a repo straight through GitHub for new releases.

[PEthierXtra]

I agree with people. +1 for Repo release notifications (without any other notifications)

[isaachinman]

Have just come across this issue almost three years later. Would definitely be useful.

[duel007]

I'm going to second previous users and say this would have been great to have back in 2015, and still would be great to have in 2018.....

[PhilippSelenium]

Looking like the Microsoft bugtracker in here: Open for years requests and solutions ignored.

[MV10]

@PhilippSelenium These days MS has hordes of interns who close the requests after they've been ignored for a certain period of time. Progress!

[rhargraves]

I would love to see this feature as well.

[riless]

Something new about this feature in 2018?

[ERnsTL]

Well, the current status can be seen here.

Apart from that, the last I heard from Github is that this feature has been queued on their internal priorities list (see above).

[adamduren]

I think this topic should be locked to only Github official team members. There has been nothing constructive posted by Github users in a while and only receiving snark in notifications / email is getting pretty spammy. We already know it's a missed feature by a large user base.

For voting purposes we have reactions.

[aaroneg]

Snark is pretty much all you're going to get when you ignore a very reasonable request for years. And it's productive, it's clearly provoked a response.

On Mon, Apr 9, 2018, 10:06 AM Adam Duren notifications@github.com wrote:

I think this topic should be locked to only Github official team members. There has been nothing constructive posted by Github users in a while and only receiving snark in notifications / email is getting pretty spammy. We already know it's a missed feature by a large user base.

For voting purposes we have reactions.

— You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/410#issuecomment-379785042, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABVPv2AYTNdFS5Fxok3_5of90tpw6yX1ks5tm3j6gaJpZM4FFYmR .

[KoneFuzius]

+1

[duel007]

I just found out from someone that you can just subscribe to the RSS for the repo and get notified that way, through slack or any other RSS reader. Like this:

https://github.com/userhere/repohere/releases.atom

[captainark]

I wanted to be notified of new releases on projects I follow, so I wrote a shell script to automatically add repos I am starring on GitHub to a rss2email installation.

It's available here if you're interested.

[Ardakilic]

Sibbell.com is shutting down on May 15th, so I found an another alternative:

https://coderelease.io/

Not tried yet though (Added some watches, but didn't get a release yet).

[kirillgroshkov]

I've built another alternative to Sibbell, free and open source, check it out: https://releases.netlify.com

[Ardakilic]

I've created a simple cli tool called AlertHub.

Coderelease failed to notify me recently, so I made one myself a couple of weeks ago. Currently I'm watching 22 repositories with it.

AlertHub is a simple tool written with NodeJS to get alerted from GitHub releases.

This simple cli tool watches the releases set in config, and notifies you with E-mail or PushBullet, and provides you an aggregated RSS feed which you can use in IFTTT or your personal feed reader.

https://github.com/Ardakilic/alerthub

What my tool provides is that it can follow tags and commits, in addition to releases. The tool relies on Atom feeds of GitHub.

What my tool lacks is multi user feature and a UI, and you need to self-host it and must have SMTP and/or PushBullet credentials, but I don't need such features such as UI etc. so.

[captn3m0]

I made yet-another-solution-to-this-issue: https://opml.bb8.fun/

Generates a OPML file of all your GitHub starred projects (doesn't need auth). Similar to @captainark's solution, but anyone with a Feedly account can use it. You can import the generated OPML file to whatever app you use for RSS.

[schrepfler]

Congrats on the sale GitHub! Congrats on the acquisition MS! Can we please have this feature as you're bombarding people with emails for no reason at all, we don't care to receive 150 emails with trivial changes for a repository, it's killing our inboxes. We should be able to select what we want to watch, and I want to watch only releases. Think how much money you'll be saving with unsent emails!!!!

[MV10]

@schrepfler Too funny, this feature-request was the first thing I thought of when I heard about the sale!

[kirillgroshkov]

https://releases.netlify.com allows to receive email with updated starred projects once a day (or as soon as release is published, configurable).

Sure, I'm also waiting for Github to build such feature, but they said only the acquisition itself will finish in December..

[olegdater]

very much needed feature! surprised it's not implemented in GitHub :(

[DasLeo]

+1

[thomasLechaptois]

+1

[AlexWayfer]

GitPunch (a.k.a. Win a Beer) from @vfeskov is evolving and very good, especially after partially resolving https://github.com/vfeskov/gitpunch/issues/24

I'm waiting for subject-feature in GitHub, I used Sibbel before it closed, and I recommend this service.

[jacobdeichert]

I ended up making this a few months ago for myself: github release checker. It finds releases/tags for all repos you've starred. Once you do it the first time, you can "mark all as read". The next time you check for more, it'll only show you the new releases/tags since last time (it tracks them via local storage, no backend!).

And here's the live github pages version

It's completely client-side and doesn't require you to sign in at all. It just needs a public access api token to retrieve your stars and to make requests to check for releases.

Beware: It's not optimized at all... it makes multiple requests per repo you've starred. Not for everyone, but it fits my use case. I check it once every few days 🙂

[jsolbrig]

I'm curious to hear a response from the github team on this at this point. It has currently been over three years since this seemingly simple (maybe it's not) feature request was made and it seems to have gotten quite a bit of visibility. Why doesn't this exist yet?

[ovid-io]

This is a bit ridiculous considering this banner:

[versipellis]

Three years later, and still nothing? Wow.

[jsolbrig]

Right? Not a single word. This doesn't seem like it would be a hard fix.

[janos]

Since I was having the same issues as you guys here, I’ve created a project of my own to solve them https://newreleases.io.

Since I’m a developer, using several different programming languages, I was not in the need only for GitHub new releases notifications, so this project supports 9 different programming/packaging platforms (GitHub, PyPi, Gems, Docker...). New release notifications can be sent out to your email and/or Slack account and there are several filtering options, even based on regex.

[kirillgroshkov]

@janos is it opensource? I'd like to check the code:)

[janos]

Hi @kirillgroshkov, it is not opensource, but it uses a lot of packages that are opensourced on https://github.com/janos and the project is very similar to https://github.com/gopherpit/gopherpit.

[kirillgroshkov]

@janos may I ask why isn't it opensource? For me, everything that is "by developers for developers" can benefit from being opensourced

[AlexWayfer]

@janos may I ask why isn't it opensource? For me, everything that is "by developers for developers" can benefit from being opensourced

Come on, you're writing in the closed-source GitHub.

[janos]

@kirillgroshkov I think that the problem of release notifications is better solved and accepted if they do not have to maintain and monitor they own instance of notifications service, but to rely on someone else for reliability and convenience, just as github (thanks @AlexWayfer) and other services are doing.

Opensourcing a project requires dedication and time to manage contributions that may or may not be aligned to the initial idea. On the other hand, some parts of the project is opensourced, that make sense to be opensourced, like some packages.

Having a project that is running as an easy to use service, to manage users, easily add slack integration, reliable email sending service, monitoring and other operational setups to make it reliable, is a bit different then the opensource project that needs to have clear documentation and features to run it on your own machine and have a bit different user management. GopherPit project is where I have tried that approach and it creates additional burden to the development that may not be needed. For now, it is much easier for me to maintain a web service, then an opensource project.