Release process

Semi-automation

This project relies on semantic commit messages which allows to streamline the release process (versioning and changelog generation is automated)

See proposed Commit Message Guidelines

In PR's as coming from forks (community contributions) while its welcome, we do not require to follow semantic commit messages. Yet, such PR is expected to be squash merged by project member with single semantic commit message.

PR's comming from branches have commit messages validated with commmitlint

Release flow

Releases are triggered manually by preparing a release PR's as follows

Create a release branch (should derive from current master state)
Bump version ranges of all dependencies to latest supported versions (e.g. if latest version of a dependency is 2.3.5 and range in a package.json is ^2.2.4 then it should be updated to ^2.3.5)
Note: Unfortunately there seems no reliable utility to automate that (there's a request at npm-check-updates)
If you handle installation of dependencies through npm-cross-link then --bump-deps option will bump version ranges as expected
Commit eventual dependency version updates with following commit message:
chore: Bump dependencies
Run npm run prepare-release command.
It'll automatically bump version in package.json to expected one (by inspecting changes since previous release) and will generate new changelog entry.
If needed improve generated changelog entry in CHANGELOG.md
Commit package.json and CHANGELOG.md changes with following commit message: chore: Release
Note: For automation purpose it is important that it's the last commit in the PR
Push branch upstream and create a PR.
Release PR's are automatically detected in CI by fact of version in package.json file being changed in last commit. In context of that build, existence of new version changelog entry (in CHANGELOG.md) is validated.
After PR is accepted by CI and one of the reviewers, merge it via "Rebase and merge" option

Further actions are automated in CI context:

master CI build detects that release PR was merged (by fact that it covers change of version field in package.json file). Having that (after successufl tests pass) version tag is created and pushed to the repository.
tag CI build, publishes new version to npm, also it retrieves release notes from CHANGELOG.md and publishes them to GitHub.

Updating release notes for already published versions

Improvements to release notes can be done at anytime to any already published version:

Update CHANGELOG.md with desired changes (ensure they'd also end in master)
Push updated release notes to GitHub by running:
npx github-release-from-cc-changelog <version>

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