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?

[TPS]

I just sent this to support@ (Maybe this issue could be expanded to include mentioned subscriptions?)

Feature request: subscribe to any specific page of a project

As I mentioned, it'd be amazing to subscribe receive notifications of any page of a project. I'd personally love to subscribe to just releases &/or changelogs to many projects, for instance, but may want to even subscribe to any changes in, e.g., the skins subfolder.

Thanks for an amazing service! ☺

P.S.: I'll track this via https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/410 =)

[TPS]

Just received reply — here's hoping:

On Thu, Jul 2, 2015, 11:03 AM Ivan Žužak support@github.com wrote:

Thanks for the suggestion -- I've passed it along to the team working on notifications to consider.

Cheers,
Ivan

[Gittyperson]

This would be a great feature.

[TomasValenta]

Not only great, but required for some repos ;)

[captn3m0]

An RSS feed for subscribing to a project release would be really cool.

[mkurz]

An RSS feed for subscribing to a project release would be really cool.

This is possible already. For example go to https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/releases, have a look in the html source of the page. Search for .atom and you will find urls to feeds:
https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/releases.atom
https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/tags.atom
https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/commits/master.atom

So you get a feed with releases with a url like:
https://github.com/USER/REPO/releases.atom

[rvanlaak]

Did also report this one to Github earlier last year 👍

[maidmaid]

👍 the Watch button should look like this :

[rvanlaak]

Think one extra option between 'not watching' and 'watching' would be enough, something like 'only watch releases'.

[amerikan]

This would be awesome. I always find myself going back to projects to check if there is a newer version.

[vidstige]

This would be awesome. Something simple, like the "only watch releases" suggested above.

[StubbsPKS]

Would also love this. I'm currently using a separate service to watch the releases.atom folder and have that service e-mail me when it changes.

[TPS]

@StubbsPKS For the record, what service do you use?

[StubbsPKS]

@TPS If This, Then That. https://ifttt.com/

[MatzFan]

This would make GitHub even more awesome - if that is possible.. 😄

[designosis]

I'm a bit stunned that this hasn't been addressed yet.
There's a "Subscribe" notifications button in an issues thread, by not in releases??
The moment I star a project, I'm interested enough to know about code changes.
But instead, I have to watch, and endure an inbox flooded with issue complaints (80% from people too lazy to RTFM).
As a result, I don't watch projects, and am therefore denied one of the aspects of github that excites me the most: learning when something of great interest has been improved, and benefiting from the authors' great work.

TL/DR The ability to watch releases ONLY would be incredible useful. A subscribe button on a projects /releases page would do the trick, though @maidmaid's suggestion is even better.

[schrepfler]

For example, a project like scylla or rxjava can have hundreds of issues between releases. These have literally clogged up my email inbox even though the only thing I'm interested in is releases.

[ghost]

Seems like a must have feature. I went searching for it because I assumed it was possible.

[julkue]

If you want to watch releases of a project that is available in a package manager like e.g.:

you might have success with the "Subscribe to releases" feature of libraries.io:

It will send you an email when there are new releases.
Btw: I'm not the author, maintainer of anything else of libraries.io, nor do I receive any provision or something else 😆

[mozggg]

This would be a killer feature.
I'm a maintainer and watching for project gives me too many messages. But I often miss releases.

[BenjaminHCCarr]

I too maintain things for Homebrew, Homebrew-Cask, and Homebrew-FUSE, it would be EXTREMELY helpful to know when I need to re-package my brews, and write a new ruby script!

[BenjaminHCCarr]

@julmot some of us are the maintainers for those packagers, but we are under hundreds of issues, patches, etc, for the daily/weekly/yearly RC, and then release.

[schrepfler]

Really github, it's a no-brainer.

[antgel]

Is anyone listening? If so, at least providing easier access to the hidden atom URLs would be a start. :)

[rvanlaak]

Sounds like a no-brainer to me, from business perspective this will lower the shit-storm of insta-archive emails they are sending now for all issues / PRs 😉

[corvuscornix]

Need this feature as well. I'm glad I'm not the only one.

[Secbone]

+1

[alexblack]

Would love to see this

[dimisjim]

I get no email notification for a new release :( even though I am watching only for releases :(

[AlexWayfer]

I get no email notification for a new release :( even though I am watching only for releases :(

This issue is feature request. The feature is working for the most of people. So, you had better to write to support.

[multlurk]

Please fix this issue "Without adding a message to the release, it only counts as a "tag" and not as a full release". So I do not receive notifications for projects that do not contain a release message in their releases.

[beruic]

@multlurk IMHO it seems like something you should create a new issue for

[multlurk]

@beruic done #1715

[core-code]

can we please have another Atom feed that excludes pre-release releases?

[JamesTheAwesomeDude]

This has never worked right for me as-implemented by GH.

Why did you shut your service down before verifying its replacement's suitability, @Richard87??

[Ardakilic]

There's another service called ReleaseBell: https://releasebell.com/ , I haven't actually checked though, saw on awesome-selfhosted repository.

However, I still use my self-hosted tool, AlertHub, on a cheap VPS without issues: https://github.com/Ardakilic/alerthub . I get email and push notifications on the releases I set.

[AlexWayfer]

Why did you shut your service down before verifying its replacement's suitability, @Richard87??

Look at https://gitpunch.com/

I'm still using it for projects which use tags without GitHub Releases.

[captn3m0]

@core-code You can run an existing feed with the RSS-Bridge Filter (as a rudimentary Yahoo pipe) to filter out the pre-releases.

My public rss-bridge server has the filter bridge enabled for eg: https://rss-bridge.bb8.fun/#bridge-Filter

As an example:

• All Kubernetes releases
• corresponding atom feed for all releases
• Blocking regex: (beta|alpha) to block out the beta/alpha releases.
• Final RSS Feed with filter applied: View as HTML, Atom

Edit: This is a hack. Would love if GitHub actually supported different release feeds.

[core-code]

@captn3m0 this only works for repositories which consistently tag their pre-releases with "alpha" or "beta". the GitHub Atom feed doesn't even contain the information whether a release is a pre-release. therefore there is no general way to filter all pre-releases. a solution would entail GitHub adding the pre-release status annotation to the feed or creating additional feeds.

[azban]

this is now available under watch -> custom -> releases

[core-code]

nice, but this doesn't address the Atom feed issue

[JamesTheAwesomeDude]

Really guys, please open a different issue, most of us are happy with this.

@schrepfler Pardon…?

It literally doesn't work. I have not got ONE release notification since Releaser closed down, despite the following being set:

[schrepfler]

Really guys, please open a different issue, most of us are happy with this.

@schrepfler Pardon…?

It literally doesn't work. I have not got ONE release notification since Releaser closed down, despite the following being set:

Maybe it's something about how you perform the release. It works for me

[Croydon]

This is not a new feature. It is available since November 2018

https://github.blog/changelog/2018-11-27-watch-releases/

As other people already pointed out, if you want further improvement you should reach out to GitHub Support or at least open a new issue here or post in the GitHub forum.

Continuing to post here well have zero effects. I'm going to unsubscribe from this issue now too.

[Yann-R]

Like @JamesTheAwesomeDude I'm really surprised by your last posts.

Concerning the little dozen of github repositories I follow:

• I checked "Releases" for ages (via the GitHub button: Watch/Unwatch -> Custom -> Releases)
• Nevertheless I don't receive regular e-mail notification about releases, whereas I receive many other mail notification from GitHub (for instance for the current discussion)

On the contrary, the alternative mentioned above (supplied by https://gitpunch.com/ ) is still working like a charm for me to get release notifications for GitHub projects, while I still wait for a working solution directly from GitHub.
That's why I was still interested in this discussion.

Really surprised... Maybe our posts here will have the effect to find what @JamesTheAwesomeDude, me (and others) could have in common to break this GitHub feature.

Thanks for your confirmation.

Edit. Even more surprising, I carefully checked my mails of the past years about notifications from the projects I follow:

• as said above, no notifications at all from GitHub about releases that GitPunch gives me for most of them
• but one project has the same notifications of releases from GitPunch and GitHub
• and another one has only a subset notified by GitHub compared to all release notifications from GitPunch

Of course (I verified it once again) all of them have "Releases" checkbox enabled for GitHub notifications.

[twistedpair]

I've also noticed this is a broken feature. I've been watching several repos for Custom > Releases and never received a notification from GitHub on a new release being created, despite knowing they've all cut releases in the last month. Can other people speak to this feature actually working for them?

It was an issue with my configurations in Settings > Notifications > Watching.

[dimisjim]

yeah works fine here

[TPS]

For those of you having problems with this, have y'all verified that your various e-mail settings are correct under https://github.com/settings/notifications? Also, your e-mail account itself isn't spamming them? I, too have no problems, & am mystified whenever anyone complains here.…

[twistedpair]

My apologies, @dimisjim . It was an issue with my configurations in Settings > Notifications > Watching.

Thanks for your help and patience. Hope that helps others as well.

[brianjmurrell]

@TPS If This, Then That. https://ifttt.com/

Only if you want to pay $4/mo. for something GitHub should be doing itself.