tag-old-releases

Did you forget to tag all your npm releases in git? Yeah me too. This utility tags them retroactively.

Obviously, that's a subjective thing. So use this at your own risk.

Usage

npm install -g tag-old-releases
cd src/my-repo
tag-old-releases

Dry run

To print git tag commands without actually running them:

npm install -g tag-old-releases
cd src/my-repo
tag-old-releases --dry-run

Using a specific branch

Is your default or production branch not called master? You can pass another branch name to use that as the reference:

tag-old-releases --branch=main

This can be used together with --dry-run as well.

How it works

tag-old-releases scans through git log of the master branch, checking out each commit as it goes backwards through time. The oldest release in which package.json has a given version is tagged as the release for this version, unless a tag already exists. Tags are named simply x.y.z (version number).

The rationale is that your release process looks like this:

• People contribute changes, which get merged over various commits, all of which have the old version number
• You decide what the new version number will be when you are actually ready to release, which makes sense for semantic versioning reasons; in that commit you edit your changelog and package.json
• That stuff gets merged back to master
• You npm publish

If your process differs — for instance if well-meaning contributors bump the version number early and then other critical commits are made before npm publish - then this script will make the wrong choice for those versions. Sorry - best we can do.

A better idea (going forward)

In future, we suggest a script like this in place of npm publish:

#!/usr/bin/env node

var exec = require('child_process').execSync;
var version = require(process.cwd() + '/package.json').version;
exec('git tag ' + version + ' && git push --tags && npm publish');

This will keep you out of trouble by tagging releases at the time you publish.

Changelog

1.1.0 - 2020-07-29

• Adds a --branch option to use a reference branch other than master.

1.0.4

• Commented and refactored a bit. Thanks to Daniel Lando.

1.0.3

• Initial fix to an ordering issue. Thanks to Daniel Lando.

1.0.0-1.0.2

• Initial releases.