embroider-build
release-plan
The most contributor friendly and hands-off release tool there is.
Features
- ✨ No manual steps[^after-initial-setup]
- release from anywhere[^release-anywhere]
- 🤖 Everything is automated via GH Action Workflows[^gh-by-default]
- 🔐 No need to give maintainers access to npm[^npm-config]
- 📦 PNPM and monorepo support by default
- also supports non-pnpm repos
- 🚀 Release preview PR
- release via merge of the release preview PR
- 📝 Automatic changelog
- changelog entries editable by editing PR titles
This allows folks with GH Maintainer access to preview and release to npm without actually needing to have any keys locally on their machine (or access to the npm package, which makes management of the repo separate from the npm package easy and encouraged).
[^gh-by-default]: While GitHub Actions is the default setup via create-release-plan-setup
[^after-initial-setup]: after initial setup, which is already mostly automated.
[^npm-config]: The NPM token can be granular, and the package needs to have its "Publishing access" configured to either "Don't require two-factor authentication" or, "Require two-factor authentication or an automation or granular access token" (recommended). This can be configured under https://www.npmjs.com/package/{package-name}/access
[^release-anywhere]: You can release from bed, the mall, the porcelain, anywhere! No need for a computer! (assuming you have a smart phone)
Usage & Installation
Automated
Use create-release-plan-setup, see the README over there for detailed instructions.
If you already have a local GITHUB_AUTH token,
npx create-release-plan-setup@latest does all the setup for you (aside from repo-configuration (see here))
You can create a GitHub personal access token here
Or, if you use the gh CLI, you can temporarily expose a token to your local terminal shell via:
export GITHUB_AUTH=$(gh auth token);This command will create
.github/workflows/
- plan-release.yml
- publish.yml
RELEASE.mdwhich is responsible for automating the process that you'd run through manually below.
Manual
npm i --save-dev release-planTo use release-plan you need to have a valid GITHUB_AUTH environment variable that has the repo permission. This allows release-plan to check what PRs have been merged since the last release and plan the release accordingly.
For new repositories or those without any tags, release-plan also requires an initial tag, we recommend:
git tag v0.0.0
git push origin v0.0.0Run
npx release-plan explain-plan. If there are unlabeled PRs that need to be released it will complain and show you a list of them. Each PR needs to be labeled with one of:- breaking
- enhancement
- bug
- documentation
- internal
Once all the PRs are labeled,
release-planwill instead show you the release plan, explaining which packages are getting released, at which versions, and why.If you disagree with the plan, you can modify the list of changes before using it to
explain-planorpreparea release:npx release-plan gather-changes > /tmp/changelog- edit
/tmp/changelog npx release-plan --from-stdin < /tmp/changelogFor example, this can be necessary if a PR that's labeled
breakingtouches multiple packages and only one of those packages is actually a breaking change. In that case you can take the other package names out of the description of the PR.
Once you're happy with the plan, run
npx release-plan prepare. This will edit CHANGELOG.md, bump the version numbers in package.json files, and create a file named.release-plan.json. Make a PR with these changes.Once the PR is merged, in a clean local repo at the merge commit, run
npx release-plan publish. If you need anotpfor your release you can provide that to thepublishcommand like thisnpx release-plan publish --otp=123456
Options (command line)
Some config for release-plan applies globally for each run of the program, this means that if you're using release-plan to release multiple packages in a monorepo all packages will have the same config. These configuration options are passed via the command-line to the release-plan publish command
--skipRepoSafetyCheck
Allows you to run "publish" even if there are uncommitted changes in your repo. Useful only for developing "publish" itself
--otp <your-one-time-password>
If the publish operation that release-plan is going to do requires a one-time-password to complete, you can use this option and release-plan will pass this on to npm for all operations.
--dryRun
Run through the release, but log to stdout instead of tagging/pushing/publishing. This can be useful when you're evaluating what release-plan is going to do when you run release-plan publish
--publish-branch <branch>
When using pnpm there is a check to make sure that you're only publishing from master or main. Passing --publish-branch to release-plan will pass it directly on to pnpm. This is not needed when using npm
--provenance
This passes on the --provenance flag to npm publish. Note this doesn't work with pnpm so you would need to set the NPM_CONFIG_PROVENANCE environment variable to true in your publish script.
--access <access-level>
This can be used to tell the registry whether the published package should be public or restricted. If this is omitted it will revert to the default value of npm or pnpm in your environment
--github-prerelease
Allows you to set the GitHub release to a pre-release. This can be useful if you're using release-plan to release beta versions.
Options (package.json)
This project attempts to have sensible defaults so there is not any need to configure release-plan in most cases. There are some cases, like releasing a prerelease version of a package, that might require some configuration depending on the type of prerelease you are doing. For config that is defined per-package (i.e. can be different for each the packages in a monorepo), you can configure that in the release-plan section of the package's package.json file.
semverIncrementAs
When release-plan is deciding what part of the semver version to update it considers the Impact a PR has on a pakcage. Impact can be either major, minor, or patch and by default they directly map on to the <major>.<minor>.<patch> parts of semver versions. For projects that need extra control over how versions are incremented, e.g. you are in a pre-1.0 release and you want a major impact to only update the <minor> section of semver, then you can set the semverIncrementAs setting to remap which semver version a particular impact would affect.
{
"name": "example",
"version": "0.9.0",
"release-plan": {
"semverIncrementAs": {
"major": "minor"
}
}
}semverIncrementTag
If you're using the semverIncrementAs functionality to do a premajor or a prerelease version, you might want to tag that prerelease with a Prelease Tag. We use the semver library internally so you can read more about how they do tags in their documentation.
{
"name": "example",
"version": "0.9.0",
"release-plan": {
"semverIncrementAs": {
"major": "premajor"
},
"semverIncrementTag": "alpha"
}
}publishTag
When you use release-plan to publish to npm it will by default publish your package with the latest tag on npm. If you are using the semverIncrementAs and semverIncrementTag configs to do a pre-release you will probably also want to set a different tag on npm to signify that the package is not to be considered latest (yet).
{
"name": "example",
"version": "0.9.0",
"release-plan": {
"semverIncrementAs": {
"major": "premajor"
},
"semverIncrementTag": "alpha",
"publishTag": "next"
}
}Usage in GitHub Enterprise
to use release-plan in GitHub enterprise environment you have to set GITHUB_DOMAIN to your ghe domain
GITHUB_DOMAIN=github.custom.com
if you have a custom api endpoint you need to set it with GITHUB_API_URL to your ghe api url e.g.
GITHUB_API_URL=https://api.github.custom.com
Comparison
Note that we take the stance of reducing friction for new contributors (regardless of how new to GitHub they are), we want to optimize for the contribution, and assume that maintainers can handle a little bit of process -- and with this stance, changesets is the most work out of this comparison.
Additionally, this comparison assumes the recommended configuration for each release tool.
| release-plan | release-it (requires computer) | changesets (requires computer) |
|---|---|---|
| add a label to a PR | same | have the repo cloned |
| merge the PR | same | add the remote of the PR-submitter to your local git |
| | | checkout the branch | |
| | | run pnpm changeset |
|
| | | write something about the change | |
| | | push it back up to the PR-submitter's branch | |
| ensure the PR title is what you want in the changelog | same | |
| | have the repo cloned | ||
| | update / sync repo locally | ||
| run npx release -it |
||
| automation creates a preview PR | | same | |
| merging that preview PR does the actual release | | same |
Needed Access: | | release-plan | release-it | changesets | | - | ------------------ | ---------- | ---------- | | NPM_TOKEN | only ci | local | only ci | | GH_TOKEN | only ci | local | only ci |
Note that while it's recommended to use release-plan with full automation, release-plan can be used locally, as described in the Manual Installation section of this README.
Summary: | | release-plan | release-it | changesets | | - | ------------------ | ---------- | ---------- | | number of steps | 5 | 6 | 8 | | Downsides | n/a |
- maintainers need admin access to both GitHub and NPM
- requires a computer
- requires push access to the submitter's PR, or potentially risk losing steam from the contributor to ask them to create the changeset
- more up-front work required per change/PR
- hard to go back and add a changeset and have it associated with the PR correctly (maybe impossible), so forgetting to add changesets pre-merge can totally ruin the accuracy of changeset's changelog
- requires a computer
Origins
This package was originally developed to help release Embroider and was extracted so everyone can use it 🎉