Managing Release on GITHUB

I was working around a few days back, managing the release of the project with versioning and proper tags associated with it which results in writing the python code.

I have written a simple python function that will call the API of GitHub and will Create/Fetch /Delete the release on GitHub.

Note** You can manage the same with CURL command too but I was facing some authentication issue, so haven’t done, I haven’t tried with explicitly passing the auth token in header by -H tag, you can give a try.

Have a look at the below snippet of code which can be easily integrated with Jenkins pipeline

import requests
import json

user = ""             #username of github account
repo = ""             #repository_name
auth = ""             #authentication token
url = "https://api.github.com"
header = {"Authorization": "token %s" %(auth), 'Accept': 'application/vnd.github.v3.raw'}
tag_name = ""         #tag_name of release
releaseId = ""        #releaseID

Here, tag_name and releaseId variables are only required if you want to delete a particular release, which you will rarely come across.

# Fetch latest release from github
def latestRelease():
    try:
        releases = requests.get('%s/repos/%s/%s/releases/latest' %(url,user,repo), headers=header).json()
        print(releases['tag_name'], releases['id'])
    except:
        print('Release Not Found')

The above code will be used to fetch the latest release present on GitHub.

# Create latest release on github
def postNewrelease():
    try:
        with open('release.json') as newRelease:
            _release = json.load(newRelease)
            release_new = requests.post('%s/repos/%s/%s/releases' %(url,user,repo), json=_release, headers=header).json()
            print(release_new)
    except:
        print("error while creating new release")

This snippet of code is used to create the release on GitHub, which contains payload in JSON format.

release.json will look something like below,

{
        "tag_name": "v1.6.0",
        "target_commitish": "master",
        "name": "v1.6.0",
        "body": "nikhil python api call release",
        "draft": false,
        "prerelease": false
}

Even with this payload, you can easily create prerelease of the master branch, which can be tested in the Staging environment.

# Delete release from github by passing tag_name & releaseId
def deleterelease():
    try:
        releaseDeleteTag = requests.delete('%s/repos/%s/%s/git/refs/tags/%s' %(url,user,repo,tag_name), headers=header)
        releaseDeleteId = requests.delete('%s/repos/%s/%s/releases/%s' %(url,user,repo,releaseId), headers=header)
        print(releaseDeleteId,releaseDeleteTag)
    except:
        print("error wile deleting release")

The above deletion method is not often required.

The full script is available in the below repository.

Github Link: https://github.com/nik0811/github-release-api.git

Feel free to comment below, if you will found any mistakes or required any type of modifications/enhancement. The code is fully tested so hopefully, you will not find any issues.