Semantic Release GH Actions Config

A shareable Semantic Release configuration, designed for use with GitHub Actions.

This repository enforces semantic commit messages. For more details and examples see the Conventional Commits Specification.

Installation

Install the package:

yarn add @immediate_media/semantic-release-gh-actions-config -D

Install semantic-release:

yarn add semantic-release -D

Usage

To use the default configuration add the following to your semantic-release configuration file (e.g. .releaserc.json):

{
  "extends": "@immediate_media/semantic-release-gh-actions-config"
}

Alternatively, we can specify options by using a .releaserc.js file:

const { config } = require('@immediate_media/semantic-release-gh-actions-config');

module.exports = config({
  gitAssets: [],
  githubAssets: [],
})

Packages

By default this configuration uses the npm plugin to publish your code as a package.

If you do not want to release your code as a package add "private": true to your package.json. This can be useful when we have a service (e.g. a website or API) where we still want to take advantage of the tagging behaviour provided by semantic release, just not deploy the code as an NPM or GitHub package.

Commit linting

This package is best used alongside commitlint and husky, in order to enforce the required commit message structure.

Install these packages with:

yarn add @commitlint/cli @commitlint/config-conventional husky -D

Create a file at commitlint.config.js with the following contents:

module.exports = {
  extends: ['@commitlint/config-conventional'],
  rules: { 'body-max-line-length': [0] },
};

And a file at .husky/commit-msg with the following contents:

npx --no -- commitlint --edit $1

And add a prepare script to your package.json:

npm pkg set scripts.prepare="husky"

GitHub Actions

Workflow

A sample GitHub Actions workflow might look something like this:

name: Release

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
      - canary/*

jobs:
  release:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          persist-credentials: false
      - name: Install
        run: yarn install --frozen-lockfile --non-interactive
      - name: Release
        run: yarn run semantic-release
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GH_DEPLOY_TOKEN }}
          NPM_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.NPM_TOKEN }}

Output

The configuration sets previous-version and next-version variables as GitHub Actions outputs, which can be useful for defining complex workflows.