🚀 Release page improvements: new navigation sidebar and per-asset download counts

[moraesc]

We've shipped a couple of improvements to make the Releases experience easier to navigate and more informative.

Sidebar table of contents

Release pages now include a dedicated sidebar table of contents, making it easier to scan, navigate, and move between entries on long pages. We also updated release metadata placement for a more consistent layout overall.

Download counts in the UI

Users with write access can now see download counts per release asset directly in the Releases UI. Previously, this data was only available through the API. With counts now visible in-product, you can more quickly understand release adoption and identify which assets are downloaded most often.

Note: Download counts do not include tarball or zipball downloads, as those are not included in the API response.

Share your feedback

If you have questions, feedback, or ideas for how we can continue to improve the Releases experience, let us know in the comments below. 👇

[vitaliyf]

Are there any plans to improve navigation for "monorepos" or repos that have disparate releases?

For example, https://github.com/apache/airflow/releases has both airflow itself, but also "helm charts" (tagged as helm-chart/X.y.z) and the CLI (airflow-ctl/X.y.z). Another example is https://github.com/prometheus-community/helm-charts/releases, or projects that maintain several major release series - for example, https://github.com/nodejs/node/releases with v26.x, v24.x, v22.x

It would be really helpful to have a way to browse in chronological order, or "diff to previous", each of these sub-components, individually.

[tats-u]

Release list should be searchable.

Having to repeatedly click the Next button to find the most recent non-Canary release at https://github.com/vercel/next.js/releases is nothing short of a chore.

[tats-u]

Moreover, the "Find a release" search field is often useless for this purpose.
e.g. https://github.com/pnpm/pnpm/releases?q=pnpm+10&expanded=true

[Marcono1234]

This. The "Find a release" field is more like a plaintext search for release title and description. You can get slightly better results by putting the search term in quotes but you might still end up with completely unrelated release entries whose description for example just happens to refer to a previous release.

A dedicated search field just for the release title (and / or Git tag name), and possibly a way to filter pre-releases would be useful.

[fregante]

Refined GitHub has this feature:

• Add releases-dropdown feature refined-github/refined-github#6506

[AleksaMCode]

@moraesc With this change, it appears that the download count for some Releases (contain no extra files) is no longer available. For example, if a project's release only includes the default source code archives, the API now returns $0$ instead of the total download count that was previously reported for the release.

I only noticed this because one of my projects uses a shields.io badge to display the release download count. Since this change, the badge now shows $0$, whereas it previously displayed more than $6,000$ downloads.

[brooksliam303-wq]

Hi @moraesc
The sidebar TOC is a nice touch, long release notes were getting hard to scan so, this helps the per asset download counts are the bigger win for me , I was hitting the API just to pull those before,
so having them right in the releases view saves a real steps one ask any chance the tarball and zipball counts could get surfaced too?

[moraesc]

@AleksaMCode thanks for letting me know about this - we're looking into it and will get back to you with an update soon

[moraesc]

@AleksaMCode could you send over the name of your repo and release?

[AleksaMCode]

@moraesc Do you not keep download count for these (source code archives)?

I see now when fetching data from https://api.github.com/repos/OWNER/REPO/releases (for the release which doesn't include additional files) the assets would be empty. Was this always the case? Are source code archives not assets? If that’s the case, I may be misremembering something.

[moraesc]

@AleksaMCode ah okay I'm glad the data is showing correctly.

yes, this was always the case for source code archives. We never stored download counts for them in the API.