How to use Github Release API to make a release without source code?

You can control the contents of sorcecode archive within automatic generation using the .gitattributes file (and make it part of your repository).

Add lines like:

src export-ignore

to exclude the directory "src" from being part of the generated source package. Internally github uses "git archive" to create packages based on the tags - and "git archive" can be controlled via ".gitattributes".

Don't know whether you can avoid generating the source package completely - but this is at least a workaround to control the contents of the source code package

To create a new release and upload additional binaries, you can :

• create the release using POST /repos/:username/:repo/releases and store the upload_url field from the response
• upload your asset using POST $upload_url with additional parameters name and optional label (refer to this)

A quick example using bash, curl and jq (JSON parser) :

#!/bin/bash

token=YOUR_TOKEN
repo=username/your-repo

upload_url=$(curl -s -H "Authorization: token $token"  \
     -d '{"tag_name": "test", "name":"release-0.0.1","body":"this is a test release"}'  \
     "https://api.github.com/repos/$repo/releases" | jq -r '.upload_url')

upload_url="${upload_url%\{*}"

echo "uploading asset to release to url : $upload_url"

curl -s -H "Authorization: token $token"  \
        -H "Content-Type: application/zip" \
        --data-binary @test.zip  \
        "$upload_url?name=test.zip&label=some-binary.zip"