Semantic Releases With Github Actions

November 29th, 2020 135 Words

If you stick to Conventional Commits for your commit messages, you can create tags and releases with GitHub Actions for every code change you push to a repository. This is great for automated and continuous releases!

Create a file in .github/workflows to store the configuration:

name: Version

on:
  push:
    branches: ["main"]

jobs:
  version:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Semantic Release
        uses: cycjimmy/semantic-release-action@v2
        id: semantic
        with:
          extra_plugins: |
            @semantic-release/git
            @semantic-release/changelog            
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.CUSTOM_GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          NPM_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.NPM_TOKEN }}

Using Semantic Versioning, every push to the main branch can trigger a new version with Conventional Commits. Additionally, you need a .releaserc file:

{
  "branches": ["main"]
}

On every run, all commit messages since the last tagged version from the configured branch will be parsed to generate a new release if needed.