Automatic Releases With Github Action And Semantic Releases

Posted on Nov 30, 2024 • Edited on Dec 12, 2024 Automating versioning and releases is essential for maintaining a smooth and consistent development workflow. By combining Semantic Versioning (SemVer) with GitHub Actions, you can automatically manage version bumps, changelogs, and releases whenever changes are pushed to your repository. This eliminates manual tasks, improves productivity, and ensures a reliable release process. This process is a part of the broader CI/CD workflow, ensuring consistent and error-free releases. In this guide, we’ll walk through setting up a GitHub Actions workflow that automates the release process using Semantic Versioning.

Before diving into the implementation, let's look at the key components we'll be using to build our automation workflow: Semantic versioning (often abbreviated as SemVer) is a versioning scheme that aims to make it clear whether changes in your project are backward compatible, introduce breaking changes, or simply fix bugs. A typical SemVer version number looks like this: MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH (e.g. v1.4.8). This is the second story about GitHub Actions. This application guides how to integrate semantic-release with github action to automate software versioning, generate release notes and notify in Slack.

Semantic Release is a way to automate the process of versioning and releasing software packages based on the semantic versioning specification, generating the release notes, and publishing the package. The Semantic Versioning scheme consists of three numbers, Major.Minor.Patch, and it helps developers communicate the nature of changes in a release. The key idea behind Semantic Release is to analyze the commit history in a version control system and automatically determine the next appropriate version number based on the nature of changes made since the... For example: When developers make significant changes that may break backward compatibility, the Major version number is incremented. When new features are added in a backward-compatible manner, the Minor version number is incremented.

ℹ️ This action is a fork of https://github.com/marvinpinto/action-automatic-releases. The easiest type of GitHub Release is to just release whenever you push a versioned tag. Maintaining the automatic-release-tag on the repo and creating releases requires write permissions to contents. This action assumes that only tagged builds also have a correlating change in the version number that is persisted into the code base. This means that you'll likely only see versions like 1.33.7 in your manifest in the code base, while there are published releases that are derived from that version. You commonly see versions like 3.13.3-dev.7 or 3.1.3-37e57 that could designate such a derived version.

Snapshot releases, like development or nightly builds, all have to be produced from the same version number in the code base. To prevent snapshot releases to conflict with tagged builds with the same version number, a unique version number needs to be generated for snapshot releases. As part of our transition from Azure DevOps (ADO) to GitHub, we’re focusing on automating the remaining parts of our workflow. One key area is the automatic creation of GitHub releases using GitHub Actions and the Semantic Release package. Semantic Release is a highly flexible tool that follow semantic versioning, but it’s primarily geared towards frontend projects, often requiring a package.json file. Additionally, it lacks preconfigured GitHub tasks from official sources, though third-party options are available and describes in various online guides.

To minimize dependencies on third-party tools, I’ve developed a few techniques to avoid committing frontend-specific files directly to the repository. In this article, I’ll walk you through an example pipeline for building and publishing GitHub release for a .NET project using these techniques. Here’s a refactored version of the provided steps: Wouldn't it be nice if you could automatically generate GitHub releases with detailed release notes? Writing release notes can be a pain, but if you take care in structuring your branches into logical work packages, writing informative commit messages, and adding summaries to your pull requests, you can automate... In this article, I will show you how to set up a GitHub Actions workflow that does just that.

This article assumes that you have a setup similar to a previous article of mine about Bulding and deploying locally using GitHub Actions and webhooks. If you followed the previous article, the workflow code you see here will be a direct drop-in into your existing workflow. If you have a different setup, you might need to adjust the workflow to fit your needs. Perhaps the most critical prerequisite is that you follow semantic versioning and write good commit messages and PR summaries. This is what the workflow will use to generate the release notes and also ensure you get major, minor, and patch versions correctly. This is really important for helping your users understand the impact of changes in your releases.

The partial workflow below is drop-in code for the workflow in the previous article. It will generate release notes based on the PR title, body, and commit messages. It will also generate links to the Docker images that were built in the workflow. One of the most common uses of GitHub Actions in Node.js projects is to automate releases: calculate the next version, tag the repository, generate release notes and publish a GitHub Release (and optionally publish... This release flow usually involves a few key steps: In this article we will set up a GitHub Actions workflow that automates this process every time you push to main.

We will explain step by step what each part of the workflow does and why it is important. We want that, every time a push happens in our main branch, a set of tasks runs to automate releases using Conventional Commits: Before going into detail, it is useful to understand how a GitHub Actions workflow is structured. The main elements are: IMPORTANT: GITHUB_TOKEN does not have the required permissions to operate on protected branches. If you are using this action for protected branches, replace GITHUB_TOKEN with Personal Access Token.

If using the @semantic-release/git plugin for protected branches, avoid persisting credentials as part of actions/checkout@v5 by setting the parameter persist-credentials: false. This credential does not have the required permission to operate on protected branches. If you are using this action to publish to the npm GitHub Packages Registry, then make sure that you configure this in your package.json file: {Optional Input Parameter} Specify version range for semantic-release. If no version range is specified with cycjimmy/semantic-release-action@v6 then semantic-release version 24.2.7 is used. {Optional Input Parameter} The branches on which releases should happen.branches supports for semantic-release above v16.

People Also Search

• Automating Releases with Semantic Versioning and GitHub Actions
• Semantic-Release Automates Release Workflow with GitHub Actions
• Automatic Semantic Releases - GitHub Marketplace
• Automatic releases with GitHub action and Semantic Releases
• Automating releases with GitHub actions | The awesome garage
• Semantic Release + Github Actions | by Vinicius Dias | Medium
• Automate Releases with Semantic Release and GitHub Actions (Step-by ...
• Action For Semantic Release - GitHub Marketplace
• Automatically Creating GitHub Releases Using GitHub Actions