How can I use github api to get all tags or releases for a project?

This morning I received an answer to this same question that I posted to the github support team. Not sure how I can attribute the answer correctly but here is their response.

Quote from Ivan Žužak of Github support team

You can get a list of all tags for a repository using this API call:

http://developer.github.com/v3/repos/#list-tags

So, for example, making the following cURL request will return the list of tags for the libgit2/libgit2 repository:

$ curl -v "https://api.github.com/repos/libgit2/libgit2/tags"

Note: for the releases specifically of a GitHub repo, you now have (since Sept. 25th, 2013), an api to list all the releases:

List releases for a repository

• Users with push access to the repository will receive all releases (i.e., published releases and draft releases).

• Users with pull access will receive published releases only.

  GET /repos/:owner/:repo/releases
  

Response

Status: 200 OK
X-RateLimit-Limit: 5000
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 4999

[
  {
    "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/releases/1",
    "html_url": "https://github.com/octocat/Hello-World/releases/v1.0.0",
    "assets_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/releases/1/assets",
    "upload_url": "https://uploads.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/releases/1/assets{?name}",
    "id": 1,
    "tag_name": "v1.0.0",
    "target_commitish": "master",
    "name": "v1.0.0",
    "body": "Description of the release",
    "draft": false,
    "prerelease": false,
    "created_at": "2013-02-27T19:35:32Z",
    "published_at": "2013-02-27T19:35:32Z"
  }
]

Get a single release

GET /repos/:owner/:repo/releases/:id

It's possible, but the documentation is perhaps not in the place you'd expect it to be.

http://developer.github.com/v3/git/refs/

You can also request a sub-namespace. For example, to get all the tag references, you can call:

GET /repos/:owner/:repo/git/refs/tags