@hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab

Automatically generate a deliverable, along with a corresponding git tag, for GitLab-hosted source code.

When you create a new deliverable for your GitLab project, you probably do several of the following:

• Get a list of all commits to the project that have not been released previously.
• Determine the appropriate semantic version to use for the deliverable.
• Generate a git tag for the repository on GitLab with that version.
• Publish a GitLab release page with a list of changes in that version.
• Inform people subscribed to GitLab issues, or merge requests, about the deliverable.

By automating these steps @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab alleviates some of the overhead in managing a project, allowing you to quickly and consistently deploy enhancements that provide value to your consumers.

Table of Contents

• Features
• Installation
• Usage
  • CLI Options
  • How the Deliverable is Generated
  • Required GitLab CE/EE Edition
  • Continuous Integration and Delivery (CID) Setup
• Release Strategies
  • On Every Push To A Repository With New Commits
  • On A Schedule
• How to Publish Project to an npm Registry
• Version Selection
• Common Issues
  • GitLabError: 404 Project Not Found (404)
• Security Disclosure Policy
• Professional Support
• Debugging
• Node Support Policy
• Contributing

Features

• [x] Get a list of unreleased commits using git-raw-commits.
• [x] Detect commit message convention used by a project with conventional-commits-detector.
• [x] Determine appropriate version for the deliverable, or whether to generate a deliverable at all, with conventional-recommended-bump.
• [x] Publish a GitLab release using conventional-gitlab-releaser.
• [x] Create an annotated git tag on GitLab.
• [x] Post a comment to GitLab issues closed by changes included in a deliverable.

Installation

To use the @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab tool in your project's delivery process you may either install the package or use our Docker image.

To install the package please run the following command:

yarn add --dev @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab

For Docker, please see the Continuous Integration and Delivery (CID) Setup section below

Usage

There are two ways to use @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab, either as a CLI tool, or programmatically.

To learn how @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab can be used to automatically generate deliverables for your project on new changes to your repository, please see the Continuous Integration and Delivery (CID) Setup section below.

CLI Tool

Call @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab from within your project's top folder:

$(yarn bin)/semantic-delivery-gitlab

Programmatically

const semanticDeliveryGitlab = require(`@hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab`);

const config = {
	/**
	 * Options are the camelCase form of their respective CLI flag.
	 */

	/**
	 * For example, the `--dry-run` option can be set like so:
	*/
	dryRun: true,

	/**
	 * The `--preset` option can be set like so:
	 */
  preset: `angular`,

  /**
   * The `--token` option can be set like so:
   */
  token: `TOKEN`,
};

try {
  const result = semanticDeliveryGitlab(config);
  /* Package successfully delivered to GitLab. */
} catch (error) {
  /* Do any exception handling here. */
}

CLI Options

The following CLI options are supported and can be passed to @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab:

[--help]

Help on using the CLI.

$(yarn bin)/semantic-delivery-gitlab --help

[--token ]

For @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab to publish a release to GitLab you must pass a GitLab Personal Access Token:

$(yarn bin)/semantic-delivery-gitlab --token ${GITLAB_TOKEN}

The personal access token must have the following scope set:

• api

The personal access token must be setup on an account for a member of the project you're wanting to automatically release.

GitLab permissions are documented on the GitLab Permissions site.

[--preset ]

Version selection and the format of the release notes are configured through a conventional-changelog preset package.

For example, to use the ESLint release conventions, first install their preset package along-side @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab:

yarn add --dev conventional-changelog-eslint

Then pass the name, minus conventional-changelog-, of the preset package to @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab:

$(yarn bin)/semantic-delivery-gitlab --preset eslint

If a preset is not provided @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab will use conventional-changelog-angular.

[--dry-run]

To verify your environment is setup correctly, but not generate a deliverable, you can conduct a dry run of ``@hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab`:

$(yarn bin)/semantic-delivery-gitlab --dry-run

This work well with the Debugging section below.

How the Deliverable is Generated

First step of @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab is to get a list of commits made to your project after the latest semantic version tag. If no commits are found, which typically happens if the latest commit in your project is pointed to by a semantic version tag, then @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab will exit cleanly and indicate no changes can be released. This ensures you can run the release process multiple times and only release new versions if there are unreleased commits. If unreleased commits are available, @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab will proceed to the next step.

Unless you have configured a preset, the convention used by your project will be determined by conventional-commits-detector. Once we have determined your convention, we pass along the preset package associated with that convention to conventional-recommended-bump. conventional-recommended-bump will determine the appropriate version to release. For more information on how versions are determined, please see the Version Selection section below.

Once a recommendation has been provided by conventional-recommended-bump, we generate a new GitLab release page, with a list of all the changes made since the last version. Creating a GitLab release also creates an annotated git tag (You can retrieve the annotated tag using git fetch).

Lastly, a comment will be posted to every issue that is referenced in a released commit, informing subscribers to that issue of the recent release and version number.

Required GitLab CE/EE Edition

Version 9.0, or higher, of GitLab CE/EE is required for @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab.

Core features used:

• GitLab release page
• API v4

This only applies to you if you're running your own instance of GitLab. GitLab.com is always the latest version of the GitLab application.

Continuous Integration and Delivery (CID) Setup

Since @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab relies only on a GitLab token, and a package published to the public npm registry, @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab should work on any GitLab platform.

Configuring a GitLab CI job is facilitated through a .gitlab-ci.yml configuration file. To publish changes using @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab you will need to create a dedicated build stage that executes only after all other builds and tests have completed successfully.

That can be done with GitLab CI by creating a dedicated deliver stage and adding it as the last item under stages. Next, create a job called deliver and add it to the deliver stage. Within deliver call semantic-delivery-gitlab.

You can see a snippet of a .gitlab-ci.yml file below with this setup:

stages:
  - build
  - test
  - deliver

deliver:
  before_script:
    - yarn install --frozen-lockfile
  image: node:8
  only:
    - master@<GROUP>/<PROJECT>
  script:
    - $(yarn bin)/semantic-delivery-gitlab --token ${GITLAB_TOKEN}
  stage: deliver

An alternative is to use our Docker image:

stages:
  - build
  - test
  - deliver

deliver:
  image:
    name: registry.gitlab.com/hyper-expanse/open-source/semantic-delivery-gitlab:9.0.0
    entrypoint: [""]
  only:
    - master
  script:
    - semantic-delivery-gitlab --token ${GITLAB_TOKEN}
  stage: deliver

Full documentation for GitLab CI is available on the GitLab CI site.

In addition to publishing a new release on every new commit, which is the strategy shown above, you may use use any number of other strategies, such as publishing a release on a given schedule. Please see the Release Strategies section below for a few such alternative approaches.

Release Strategies

You can employ many different release strategies using an automated tool such as semantic-release-gitlab.

Below we document a few release strategies. Please don't consider this list exhaustive. There are likely many other ways to decide when it's best to generate a new release for your project.

On Every Push To A Repository With New Commits

Publishing a new release on every push to a repository with new commits is the approach taken by this project. If you take this approach, you can push a single commit, leading to a release for that one change, or you can create multiple commits and push them all at once, leading to a single release containing all those changes.

An example our setup for GitLab CI can be seen in the Continuous Integration and Delivery (CID) Setup section above.

On A Schedule

You may also release your changes on a schedule. For example, using a CI platform like Jenkins CI, you can create and configure a job to run on a given schedule, such as once every two we eks, and, as part of a Post Build Action, run the release tool.

Other CI platforms besides Jenkins also allow you to run a particular action on a given schedule, allowing you to schedule releases as you could with Jenkins CI.

With this strategy all commits that have accumulated in your repository since the last scheduled job run will be incorporated into a single new release. Because this release tool uses conventional-recommended- bump, which recommends an appropriate new version based on all commits targeted for release, you can be assured that each scheduled release will use a version appropriate for the changes accumulated in that release.

How to Publish Project to an npm Registry

Once @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab has created a release on GitLab, the next step for an npm package is to publish that package to an npm-compatible registry. To publish your project to an npm-compatible registry, please use npm-publish-git-tag.

Version Selection

As noted earlier @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab uses conventional-recommended-bump to determine if a deliverable should be generated, and whether that should be a new major, minor, or patch version.

The process involves @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab passing the list of all unreleased commits, along with your project's commit message convention, to conventional-recommended-bump. conventional-recommended-bump will either report that no new deliverable is recommended, or it will recommend a new major, minor, or patch version.

If conventional-recommended-bump indicates that no new deliverable should be made, @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab will not generate a new version of your project.

If a deliverable is recommended, and no previous version exists, we will always set the first version to 1.0.0.

If a previous version exists, we take that version and increment it according to the recommendation using the default behavior of the inc function provided by the semver package.

Common Issues

A collection of common issues encountered while using @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab.

GitLabError: 404 Project Not Found (404)

In some instances you may see the following error after running @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab:

semantic-delivery-gitlab failed for the following reason - GitLabError: 404 Project Not Found (404)

The project, or at least the project URL used by @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab, may not be valid. Please make sure the repository field in your package.json is correct. If it is correct, please consider running @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab in debug mode, following the Debugging section below, to see what URL is being used to interact with GitLab.

It may also be that a token was not provided either on the command line using --token, or as a configuration property.

Security Disclosure Policy

To report a security vulnerability in this package, or one of it's dependencies, please use the Tidelift security contact page. Tidelift will coordinate the process to address the vulnerability and disclose the incident to our users.

Professional Support

Professional support for @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab is available with a Tidelift Subscription.

Tidelift helps make open source sustainable for maintainers while giving companies assurances about security, maintenance, and licensing for their dependencies.

Debugging

To assist users of @hutson/semantic-delivery-gitlab with debugging the behavior of this module we use the debug utility package to print information about the release process to the console. To enable debug message printing, the environment variable DEBUG, which is the variable used by the debug package, must be set to a value configured by the package containing the debug messages to be printed.

To print debug messages on a unix system set the environment variable DEBUG with the name of this package prior to executing semantic-delivery-gitlab:

DEBUG=semantic-delivery-gitlab semantic-delivery-gitlab

On the Windows command line you may do:

set DEBUG=semantic-delivery-gitlab
semantic-delivery-gitlab

Node Support Policy

We only support Long-Term Support versions of Node.

We specifically limit our support to LTS versions of Node, not because this package won't work on other versions, but because we have a limited amount of time, and supporting LTS offers the greatest return on that investment.

It's possible this package will work correctly on newer versions of Node. It may even be possible to use this package on older versions of Node, though that's more unlikely as we'll make every effort to take advantage of features available in the oldest LTS version we support.

As each Node LTS version reaches its end-of-life we will remove that version from the node engines property of our package's package.json file. Removing a Node version is considered a breaking change and will entail the publishing of a new major version of this package. We will not accept any requests to support an end-of-life version of Node. Any merge requests or issues supporting an end-of-life version of Node will be closed.

We will accept code that allows this package to run on newer, non-LTS, versions of Node. Furthermore, we will attempt to ensure our own changes work on the latest version of Node. To help in that commitment, our continuous integration setup runs against all LTS versions of Node in addition the most recent Node release; called current.

JavaScript package managers should allow you to install this package with any version of Node, with, at most, a warning if your version of Node does not fall within the range specified by our node engines property. If you encounter issues installing this package, please report the issue to your package manager.

Contributing

Please read our contributing guide to see how you may contribute to this project.