newallone / release

Manage GitHub Releases from the command line

When run, this command line interface automatically generates a new GitHub Release and populates it with the changes (commits) made since the last release.

Usage

Install the package from npm (you'll need the latest version of Node.js - why?):

$ npm install -g release

Run this command inside your project's directory:

$ release

Options

The following command will show you a list of all available options:

$ release help

Change Types

As described in the Semantic Versioning guide, a commit falls into one of these categories:

• Major Changes (incompatible API changes)
• Minor Changes (functionality in a backwards-compatible manner)
• Patches (backwards-compatible bug fixes)

When running the release command, you'll be asked to provide the types for all of the commits you've created since the last release. This allows the package to automatically generate a proper changelog for you.

Pre-Defining the Type of a Commit

If you want to automate this even further, specify the change type of your commits by adding it to the title or description within parenthesis:

Error logging works now (patch)

Assuming that you've defined it for a certain commit, the package won't ask you to set a type for it manually. This will make the process of creating a release much faster.

Why?

As we at ZEIT moved all of our GitHub repositories from keeping a HISTORY.md file to using GitHub Releases, we needed a way to automatically generate these releases from our own devices, rather than always having to open a page in the browser and manually add the notes for each change.

Contributing

You can find the authentication flow here.

1. Fork this repository to your own GitHub account and then clone it to your local device
2. Uninstall the package if it's already installed: npm uninstall -g release
3. Link the package to the global module directory: npm link
4. You can now use release on the command line!

As always, you can use npm test to run the tests and see if your changes have broken anything.

Credits

Thanks a lot to Daniel Chatfield for donating the "release" name on npm and my lovely team for telling me about their needs and how I can make this package as efficient as possible.

Author

Leo Lamprecht (@notquiteleo) - ▲ZEIT