Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
51 lines (37 loc) · 3.05 KB

making-a-release.md

File metadata and controls

51 lines (37 loc) · 3.05 KB
Raw

Making a Release

Once a project has been configured to use gha-scala-library-release-workflow, a release can be performed by any GitHub user with write access to the repo, simply by triggering the release workflow.

Here's a video of that in action (full-screen the video to see all details):

release.full-demo.rapid.mp4

Walkthrough of steps

Navigate to Run workflow

  • Click on the Actions tab in your repo:
    image
  • Select the Release workflow from the list of workflows on the left-hand side of the page:
    image
  • Click on Run workflow on the right-hand side of the blue "This workflow has a workflow_dispatch event trigger." bar:
    image

Choose release type

image

  • In the modal popup that appears, decide on your release type:
    • Normal full release : leave the branch set to the default (ie main)
    • Preview release (eg of an unmerged PR) : select the PR's branch from the Branch: dropdown
  • Click on the green Run workflow button

Monitor the release

You've started a release! However, the GitHub UI can be slow to update, so reload the page, and then click on the new workflow run to see its progress:
image

Why can't releases be triggered in another way?

One potentially elegant alternative way to trigger a release would be trigger the workflow when a GitHub Release is manually created by a developer.

Unfortunately that would require a Git release version tag to be previously created by the developer, and a primary motivation of gha-scala-library-release-workflow is to avoid humans choosing release version numbers - because humans are terrible at judging compatibility, and thus knowing what the correct semver version bump should be.

If a human has manually chosen a version number before automated workflow occurs, we've already lost. Better to let the workflow make automatic compatibility-based checks, and derive the new version number (and release tag) for itself.

The gha-scala-library-release-workflow automatically creates a GitHub Release, with automatically-generated release notes, as part of the release process, so a GitHub Release is still created with each release.