Automatic Version Tag And Release With Github Actions

Leo Migdal

-Nov 9, 2025, 6:35 PM

automatic version tag and release with github actions

GitHub Actions is a powerful tool that allows developers to automate tasks and workflows within their GitHub repositories. One common use case is automating version tagging and release creation for software projects. In this tutorial, we will explore how to configure GitHub Actions to automatically create version tags and releases for a GitHub repository. In this post, we are going to use GitVersion, which is a tool that generates a Semantic Version number based on your Git history. The version number generated from GitVersion can then be used for various different purposes, such as: To configure automatic version tagging and release creation, you will need to follow these steps:

Github uses a special directory called .github/workflows as the location for the configuration of the workflow in the repository. Let’s take a look to the tag-release-version workflow in tag-release-version.yml file: 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).

Automating tagging and release workflows in GitHub can significantly streamline the process of deploying software, ensuring consistency and reliability while reducing the likelihood of human error. This guide explores how to set up automation for tagging and managing releases in GitHub, using built-in features like GitHub Actions. Automating these workflows offers several advantages: Before automating the process, clearly define the conditions under which a new tag is created and a release is made. Common triggers include: GitHub Actions can automate the creation of tags based on your triggers.

Here's how you can set up an action to tag commits: Create a new GitHub Actions workflow file in your repository under .github/workflows, for example, tagging.yml. This action simplifies the GitHub release process by automatically uploading assets, generating changelogs, handling pre-releases, and so on. NOTE: The marvinpinto/action-automatic-releases repository is an automatically generated mirror of the marvinpinto/actions monorepo containing this and other actions. Please file issues and pull requests over there. This example workflow will kick in as soon as changes land on master.

After running the steps to build and test your project: You can see a working example of this workflow over at marvinpinto/actions. Similar to the previous example, this workflow will kick in as soon as new tags are pushed to GitHub. After building & testing your project: 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.

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Find centralized, trusted content and collaborate around the technologies you use most. Bring the best of human thought and AI automation together at your work. Today, I wanted to share the GitHub Action I built to automatically create a new release for Kelp whenever I update the version number in the package.json file. (Don’t want to read all of those. Grab the GitHub Action script here.) Every time I add a new feature to Kelp, my UI library for people who love HTML, I have complete a series of steps…

I know from past experience that I often forget one or more of those last few steps. I’ll forget to create a release note on GitHub, or forget to push to NPM. Then someone opens a GitHub issue asking me to fix it so they can grab the latest version of the code. Posted on Aug 1, 2021 • Edited on Aug 13, 2024 When we are developing JavaScript packages, there is a series of repetitive tasks that we have to complete manually every time we have to publish a new release to npm: Wouldn't be great if we could automate all of these tasks?

GitHub Actions and semantic-release have us covered! GitHub Actions is a GitHub feature that lets us build, test, and deploy our GitHub hosted projects. You can think of it as the CI/CD pipeline for GitHub. It uses YAML files, called workflows, that trigger based on specific events (e.g. when a commit is pushed). semantic-release is a tool that uses the Conventional Commits message format to determine the type of changes in our code base.

It automatically sets the next semantic version number, generates the changelog and publishes the release.

Automatic Version Tag And Release With Github Actions

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