Realease

Ease up your releases.

Introduction

Realease makes releases of node libs with github a bit easier. It implements the following workflow:

1. Update package.json with a new version number
2. Create a release branch with a single commit containing the version update
3. Push that branch to github
4. Make a PR from that branch and merge it
5. Tag the resulting commit on master with the version number

Steps 1-3 are automated with a single call of realease.

Step 4 is manual.

Step 5 can be either manual or automated from your CI pipeline.

Project setup

Add realease to your project.

yarn add --dev git://github.com/njoyard/realease

Set up your CI to call realease tag on merges onto master. For example in a CircleCI configuration file:

jobs:
  release:
    steps:
      - run:
          name: Create release tag if not already present
          command: npx realease tag

workflows:
  version: 2
  test_matrix:
    jobs:
      - ...
      - release:
          requires:
            - test
            - anythingelse
          filters:
            branches:
              only: master

The way realease tag works is that it simply checks if the tag for the current version in package.json exists. If not, it creates it, pointing to the last commit that changed the version number.

Note: calling realease tag this way requires that your CI uses a deploy key that is able to push to the repository. If that's not the case, you can use the GitHub API instead.

• Create an API token with repo access
• Store that token in an environment variable in your CI project settings
• Call realease tag --api $APITOKENVARIABLE instead

Making a release

Run realease major|minor|patch from your project repository. Click on the generated link that it outputs to open a new PR, and merge it onto master. Your CI pipeline will tag the commit when it finishes running.

Note: realease needs a SSH agent to authenticate with the git server when pushing a branch. Please ensure that you have a SSH agent running (you can check that by looking for a $SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable) and that it knows the SSH key you use to authenticate (on most systems you can add a key using ssh-add -K /path/to/private/key).

Detailed usage

realease <major|minor|patch>

Create and push a release branch for a new version. Release branch will include a new commit with updated package.json.

Options:

• --add <file>: add additional file to the release commit, may be repeated. This is useful if you want to add for example an updated CHANGELOG.
• --branch <name>: name of the branch to create, defaults to release/{version}.
• --force: do not complain if we're not currently on master
• --message <msg>: commit message, defaults to Release version {version}
• --no-push: do not push the release branch. This is useful when you want to add more commits to the release branch before pushing.
• --remote <name>: name of remote to push to, defaults to origin
• --repo <path>: specify path to repository, defaults to current directory

realease tag

Create and push a tag for the current version. Will not do anything if the tag already exists.

Options:

• --force: do not complain if we're not currently on master
• --message <msg>: tag message, defaults to Release version {version}
• --no-push: do not push the tag. Ignored when using --api.
• --remote <name>: name of remote to push to, defaults to origin
• --repo <path>: specify path to repository, defaults to current directory
• --tag <name>: name of the tag to create, defaults to v{version}
• --api <APIKEY>: use Github API to create the tag, defaults to using Git with ssh credentials from the user running realease