Making new releases is one of the most boring and tedious tasks in open source. There are many tools that try to automate publishing and one of the most interesting is . I was avoiding it for a long time because it makes publishing fully automated with changelogs generated from commit messages, and I believe that . semantic-release changelogs must be written by humans But actually it’s very flexible and I was able to customize it to do exactly what I want: Publish a new PATCH version to npm as soon as a fix commit merged to the master branch, generate changelog from commit messages. Postpone MINOR and MAJOR release until a proper changelog is written by a project maintainer. Generate changelog draft: Markdown file with all important commits since the latest release grouped into three sections: breaking changes, new features and bugfixes. Below I’ll describe my own set of scripts that implements this workflow. How it works Semantic-release runs on a CI server. After each successful build it analyzes new commits and see if there’s something to publish. It determines a release type (PATCH, MINOR or MAJOR) by analyzing commit messages (more on that later). It generates a changelog:a. If the release type is PATCH: from commit messages.b. If the release type is MINOR or MAJOR and the latest commit is a changelog: uses body of that commit as a changelog. Publishes a new version to npm. Publishes changelog to GitHub Releases page. Install semantic-release First install semantic-release command line tool: npm install -g semantic-release-cli Then run it in your project folder: semantic-release-cli setup Enter your npm and GitHub credentials. Choose “Create no .travis.yml” if you already have one, otherwise it will be overwritten. Add these lines to your travis.yml: after_success: npm run semantic-releasebranches:except: /^v\d+\.\d+\.\d+$/ Customize semantic-release You can change semantic-release behavior with plugins: detect release type, check release requirements (like a changelog), generate changelog, etc. I made a I need to support my workflow. package with all plugins First install the plugins: npm install --save-dev semantic-release-tamia Then add to your package.json: "release": {"analyzeCommits": "semantic-release-tamia/analyzeCommits","generateNotes": "semantic-release-tamia/generateNotes","verifyRelease": "semantic-release-tamia/verifyRelease"} Run and to test if everything works. You’ll see something like that: npm install npm run semantic-release semantic-release WARN pre semantic-release didn’t run on Travis CI and therefore a new version won’t be published.semantic-release WARN pre You can customize this behavior using "verifyConditions" plugins: git.io/sr-pluginssemantic-release ERR! pre Failed to determine new version.semantic-release ERR! pre ENOCHANGE There are no relevant changes, so no new version is released. Which is fine and means two things: semantic-release will not make a release until it runs in a CI environment and you have no changes that could be published. Use Git commit message convention By default semantic-release uses which I don’t like aesthetically. So I use : AngularJS conventions a slightly modified convention Each commit message consists of: Type: Feat for new feature, Fix for bug fix, etc. Subject: short change description. Body (optional): long change description. Footer (optional): breaking changes, GitHub issues references, etc. Semantic-release uses this tags to find all important commits for the release (Fix is important, Docs is not) and determine which version (MAJOR, MINOR or PATCH) should be released. Write changelog for MINOR or MAJOR release I wrote to help me with changelogs. a script First run . It will create a file with all important commits for the release grouped by type (breaking changes, new features and bugfixes) and open it in your default editor. sr-changelog Now you can rewrite your changelog to make it useful and easy to read for your users. Then run . It will make a commit without changes (git commit — allow-empty) of type Changelog and changelog in the commit message body. sr-changelog commit Publish new release Now you need to your changes and make some coffee. git push Links semantic-release My plugins and scripts for semantic-release My commit message conventions AngularJS commit message conventions How to Write an Open Source JavaScript Library Egghead course Why you need to write changelogs yourself Keep a CHANGELOG: Don’t let your friends dump git logs into CHANGELOGs Semantic Versioning

Google

Testing React components with Jest and Enzyme

Add the Fucking Change Log

Read my new book on clean code

Read My Stories

Too Long; Didn't Read

Make resilience your competitive advantage

Automate npm releases with semantic-release and human-written change logs

About Author

Comments

TOPICS

THIS ARTICLE WAS FEATURED IN

Related Stories

Untitled Story

Add the Fucking Change Log

10 GitHub Repositories to Follow

3 Easy Steps to Change Main Git Branch on Heroku

28 Stories To Learn About Markdown

194 Stories To Learn About Git

Add the Fucking Change Log

10 GitHub Repositories to Follow

3 Easy Steps to Change Main Git Branch on Heroku

28 Stories To Learn About Markdown

194 Stories To Learn About Git

Light-Mode

Classic

Newspaper

Dark-Mode

Neon Noir

Minty

HN StartUps