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Maintainers

This doc describes how releases are published to GitHub and npm.

Automatic Packaging + Publishing 📦

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 🥊 For example, say the current version is 8.5.1 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 the main branch
    • A prerelease tag like v8.6.0-next.1 if on the next branch
  • A few other files, such as CHANGELOG.md, the command reference pages, and our GitHub Actions bundle files, are updated based on this code 🪵
  • A build commit (like this) is created with all of the updated files (e.g., package.json, CHANGELOG.md, etc.) 🆕
  • 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 runs npm i rdme with no other specifiers).
    • If on the next branch, the prerelease distribution tag (a.k.a. next) is updated.
  • A GitHub release is created for the tag 🐙
  • If on the main branch, the new changes are backported to the next branch so both branches remain in sync 🔄

One more thing ☝️

Note

This section is only worth adhering to 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 — enhancing the GitHub release! The automation auto-generates and publishes a GitHub release, but it's often nice to add some human-generated language for 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!