Tag, release & publish automation

Summary

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

Development process

1. Develop on feature branches
2. Merge to main
3. Release PR is created automatically and updated as more commits are made on main
4. Manually merge the PR, which automatically creates the tag and release notes
5. 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