gh-actions-publish-test-abc-123

Tag, release & publish automation

Summary

This project demonstrates the setup required for tag, release & publish automation.

Development process

• Develop on feature branches
• Merge to main
• Release PR is created automatically and updated as more commits are made on main
• Manually merge the PR, which automatically creates the tag and release notes
• New version of the package is automatically published to NPM

Solution

Summary

• All commits on main adhere to Conventional Commits
• On every push to main GitHub Actions workflows parse those commits then tag, release and publish the package as required

Details

• Configure a pre-commit hook to enforce commit message syntax

  • https://github.com/conventional-changelog/commitlint
  • Enforce on the main branch only
  • Not required if main is protected but good to be safe

• Configure GitHub to enforce PR title syntax

  • https://github.com/marketplace/actions/semantic-pull-request
  • Enforce for PRs on the main branch only

• Create a workflow to automatically create a release PR on push to main

  • https://github.com/google-github-actions/release-please-action

  • Leverages the PR title syntax described above

  • Note: a release PR will only be created for releasable units, which are commits pre-fixed with:

    # minor
    feat:
    
    # patch
    fix:
    perf:
    refactor:
    

    or breaking changes, which include a !:

    # major
    refactor!:
    fix!:
    # etc.
    

• Extend the workflow to publish to NPM after the release PR has been merged

  • Create a separate action to run npm publish
  • Call this action when the release_created output from release-please-action is true

GitHub settings

• Give GitHub Actions write access
  • Settings > Actions > General > Workflow permissions
  • Select "Read and write permissions"
  • Select "Allow GitHub Actions to create and approve pull requests"
• Enforce squashed merges
  • Settings > General > Pull Requests
  • De-select "Allow merge commits"
• Add branch protection to main
  • Require a pull request before merging
  • Require status checks to pass before merging
    • Search for and select the action associated to the required status
  • Require branches to be up to date before merging
  • Require linear history