semantic-prerelease

A set of scripts for semantic-release that allow publishing of prerelease versions from branches.

This projects allows you to push prerelease package versions to NPM, hidden behind a dist-tag, and trigger deployments by fast-forwarding a release branch.

Prerequisites

• semantic-release 6.x+
• git 2.13+ (used for tag parsing)

This project has been tested in Travis-CI and Jenkins builds.

Usage

1. Install the node module through the following command:

   npm install --save-dev @progress/semantic-prerelease
   

2. Describe the branches that will publish prerelease versions. In this example, commits in the develop branch pushes prerelease versions to the dev dist-tag. Use fallbackTags to bootstrap the versions.

    // package.json
    "release": {
      "branchTags": {
        "develop": "dev"
      },
      "fallbackTags": {
        "dev": "latest"
      }
    }
   

3. Configure semantic-release to use the included plug-ins:

    // package.json
    "release": {
      "analyzeCommits": "@progress/semantic-prerelease/analyzeCommits",
      "generateNotes": "@progress/semantic-prerelease/generateNotes",
      "getLastRelease": "@progress/semantic-prerelease/getLastRelease",
      "verifyConditions": "@progress/semantic-prerelease/verifyConditions",
      "verifyRelease": "@progress/semantic-prerelease/verifyRelease"
    }
   

4. Use semantic-prerelease publish instead of npm publish in the end of your build. This publishes the prerelease versions behind dist-tags.

5. (Optionally) Publish scoped packages as public by using semantic-prerelease publish --public

With the above setup, new official releases (bearing the latest dist-tag) can be published from master by fast-forwarding it to develop:

git checkout master && git merge --ff-only develop && git push

Your first official release will be published with version 0.1.0 to enable automatic releases during initial development. You must mark a commit as a major release to bump the major version to 1. This is different than vanilla semantic-release where your first release is 1.0.0