Question

what is the best practice of distributing binaries from a github project?

I can think of:

• Create a bin folder in your project where you keep a copy of the binaries.
  However, github is meant to store source code and not binaries Storing large and
  regularly changing binaries may be expensive qua diskspace and bandwidth?
• Upload a copy of the binaries to the github pages of the
  project, or use a separate web site for hosting your binaries.
  However, that is not always feasible, and requires more (hand)work to keep the
  binaries up to date, I rather want to have the binaries updated automatically or with a
  single action.

Answer 1

It is clear to me now that it is important not to store binaries in your github project itself. Thus, you will need to store binaries elsewhere. Possible solutions I came across are:

• Store the binaries in a separate submodule (dalores idea). It makes sense to store them in your projects github pages, which you use to host your projects website via github.
• If you have only a few binaries or zip file only, you can upload them to github via Downloads -> Upload a new file. This feature is quite limited though, you cannot put files in structured folders.
• In case of java jar files, there are solutions out there like Nexus for managing your libraries.
• Store the binaries on a completely separate site that you host yourself