This post goes over how to publish a private Python package to GitHub Releases.

Motivation

Normally, you want to publish your public Python package to PyPI. But for private packages, GitHub Packages does not support Python.

I didn’t want to publish my package to an external private registry, so I wanted to see if I could publish it to GitHub Releases.

Publish

Publish your Python package with GitHub Actions:

# .github/workflows/release.yml
# ...
jobs:
  publish:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: write

    steps:
      - name: Checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v6

      - name: Install uv
        uses: astral-sh/setup-uv@v7

      - name: Build package
        run: uv build

      - name: Upload to GitHub Release
        run: gh release upload v${{ needs.release.outputs.version }} dist/*.whl --clobber
        env:
          GH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

See example workflow.

Check the latest release:

gh release view --repo <USER>/<REPO> --json assets -q '.assets[] | select(.name | endswith(".whl")) | .url'

Replace <USER>/<REPO> with your username/organization and repository name.

The URL should look like:

https://github.com/user/repo/releases/download/v1.2.3/python_package-1.2.3-py3-none-any.whl

Install

Use GitHub CLI to download the wheel:

gh release download <TAG> -R <USER>/<REPO> -p '*.whl' -D ./vendor/ --clobber

Replace <TAG> with your release tag (e.g., v1.2.3) and <USER>/<REPO> with your username/organization and repository name.

Install your package with uv:

uv add ./vendor/*.whl

Or pip:

pip install ./vendor/*.whl

See example repo.