This doc describes how releases are published to GitHub and npm
.
Nearly all of our release process is automated. In this section, we discuss everything that takes place!
Note
You don't need to know everything that takes place here, this is mostly for my own documentation purposes! But if you are tagging an actual release, there are a couple of outstanding steps that are described in the next section 👇
When code is merged into the main
or next
branches, a release workflow (powered by semantic-release
) automatically kicks off that does the following:
- All commit messages since the last release are analyzed to determine whether or not the new changes warrant a new release (i.e., if the changes are features or fixes as opposed to smaller housekeeping changes) 🧐
- Based on the changes, the version is bumped in
package.json
and theaction.yml
with a new git tag 🏷️ For example, say the current version is8.5.1
and the commit history includes a new feature. This would result in a minor semver bump, which would produce the following tags:- A release tag like
v8.6.0
if on themain
branch - A prerelease tag like
v8.6.0-next.1
if on thenext
branch
- A release tag like
- A changelog is generated and appended to
CHANGELOG.md
🪵 - A build commit (like this) is created with the updated
package*.json
andCHANGELOG.md
files 🆕 - A new Docker image is built with the latest code and release metadata and pushed to the GitHub Container Registry 🐳
- A couple duplicated tags are created for the current commit so our users can refer to them differently in their GitHub Actions (e.g.,
8.6.0
,v8
) 🔖 - The new commit and tags are pushed to GitHub 📌
- The new version is published to the
npm
registry 🚀 The package distribution tag will depend on which branch is being pushed to:- If on the
main
branch, a version is pushed on the main distribution tag (a.k.a.latest
, which is used when someone runsnpm i rdme
with no other specifiers). - If on the
next
branch, the prerelease distribution tag (a.k.a.next
) is updated.
- If on the
- A GitHub release is created for the tag (in draft form) 🐙
- If on the
main
branch, the new changes are backported to thenext
branch so both branches remain in sync 🔄
Note
This section is only required if you're building an actual release and not a prelease (i.e., changes are being merged into the main
branch).
While nearly all of our release process is automated, there's one more step left before we call it a day — writing up and publishing the GitHub release! The automation creates a GitHub release in a draft state, but it needs to be published so the latest version is surfaced to folks that discover our tool via the GitHub Marketplace listing.
I like to summarize the changes and note any highlights in a blurb above the auto-generated release notes. These release links are nice for sharing with customers, on socials, etc. and because of the way that GitHub's algorithm works, they present a great opportunity for our developer tools to get more visibility — so definitely worth putting a little thought and care into these!