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Release Process

Releases are mostly automated using release-it and lerna-changelog.

Preparation

Since the majority of the actual release process is automated, the primary remaining task prior to releasing is confirming that all pull requests that have been merged since the last release have been labeled with the appropriate lerna-changelog labels and the titles have been updated to ensure they represent something that would make sense to our users. Some great information on why this is important can be found at keepachangelog.com, but the overall guiding principle here is that changelogs are for humans, not machines.

When reviewing merged PR's the labels to be used are:

  • breaking - Used when the PR is considered a breaking change.
  • enhancement - Used when the PR adds a new feature or enhancement.
  • bug - Used when the PR fixes a bug included in a previous release.
  • documentation - Used when the PR adds or updates documentation.
  • internal - Used for internal changes that still require a mention in the changelog/release notes.

Release

Once the prep work is completed, the actual release is straight forward:

  • First, ensure that you have installed your projects dependencies:

    npm install

  • Second, ensure that you have obtained a GitHub personal access token with the repo scope (no other permissions are needed). Make sure the token is available as the GITHUB_AUTH environment variable.

    For instance:

    export GITHUB_AUTH=abc123def456

  • And last (but not least 😁) do your release.

    npx release-it --no-git.push

    ⚠️ Since this repository has specific protections enabled for the main branch, there's an additional step that deviates from the standard release-it setup.

    We can't push directly to the main branch, so it's necessary to push to a separate release branch after the above command completes.

  • To release with the required commits, do these additional steps.

    # create a release branch
git checkout -b release

# push the outstanding release commits to it
git push origin release

    Then open a PR, get approvals, and merge with main to complete the release.

release-it manages the actual release process. It will prompt you to to choose the version number after which you will have the chance to hand tweak the changelog to be used (for the CHANGELOG.md and GitHub release), then release-it continues on to tagging, pushing the tag and commits, etc.