Releases in this repo are mostly automated using release-plan. Once you label all your PRs correctly (see below) you will have an automatically generated PR that updates your CHANGELOG.md file and a .release-plan.json that is used to prepare the release once the PR is merged.
Since the majority of the actual release process is automated, the remaining tasks before releasing are:
- correctly labeling all pull requests that have been merged since the last release
- updating pull request titles so they 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 - Internal changes or things that don't fit in any other category.
Note: release-plan requires that all PRs are labeled. If a PR doesn't fit in a category it's fine to label it as internal
Once the prep work is completed, the actual release is straight forward: you just need to merge the open Plan Release PR
If you need to do something like an alpha or a specific version or something that release-plan is having trouble with, you can manually invoke release-it instead. You will still need to ensure all PRs are correctly labeled to get the correct changelog generation, but once that is done you can release by running:
pnpm release-it
It will then prompt you to choose the version, confirm the changelog, publish to npm and GitHub etc and handle all the aspects of release for you.