Automate Releases

If your project follows a semantic versioning, it may be a good idea to automatize the steps needed to do a release. The recipe below bumps the project version, commits the changes to git and creates a new GitHub release.

For publishing a GitHub release you'll need to create a personal access token and add it to your project. However, we don't want to commit it, so we'll use dotenv to load it from a git-ignored .env file:

GH_TOKEN=ff34885...

Don't forget to add .env to your .gitignore.

Next, install all the necessary dependencies for this recipe:

npm install --save-dev conventional-recommended-bump conventional-changelog-cli conventional-github-releaser dotenv execa

Based on your environment, setup and preferences, your release workflow might look something like this:

const gulp = require('gulp');

const conventionalRecommendedBump = require('conventional-recommended-bump');

const conventionalGithubReleaser = require('conventional-github-releaser');

const execa = require('execa');

const fs = require('fs');

const { promisify } = require('util');

const dotenv = require('dotenv');

// load environment variables

const result = dotenv.config();

if (result.error) {

throw result.error;

}

// Conventional Changelog preset

const preset = 'angular';

// print output of commands into the terminal

const stdio = 'inherit';

async function bumpVersion() {

// get recommended version bump based on commits

const { releaseType } = await promisify(conventionalRecommendedBump)({ preset });

// bump version without committing and tagging

await execa('npm', ['version', releaseType, '--no-git-tag-version'], {

stdio,

});

}

async function changelog() {

await execa(

'npx',

[

'conventional-changelog',

'--preset',

preset,

'--infile',

'CHANGELOG.md',

'--same-file',

],

{ stdio }

);

}

async function commitTagPush() {

// even though we could get away with "require" in this case, we're taking the safe route

// because "require" caches the value, so if we happen to use "require" again somewhere else

// we wouldn't get the current value, but the value of the last time we called "require"

const { version } = JSON.parse(await promisify(fs.readFile)('package.json'));

const commitMsg = `chore: release ${version}`;

await execa('git', ['add', '.'], { stdio });

await execa('git', ['commit', '--message', commitMsg], { stdio });

await execa('git', ['tag', `v${version}`], { stdio });

await execa('git', ['push', '--follow-tags'], { stdio });

}

function githubRelease(done) {

conventionalGithubReleaser(

{ type: 'oauth', token: process.env.GH_TOKEN },

{ preset },

done

);

}

exports.release = gulp.series(

bumpVersion,

changelog,

commitTagPush,

githubRelease

);