release-it Action

release-it-action

Runs release-it as a GitHub Action, with handling for semantic releases and protected branches. 📤

Usage

This action works by:

Checking should-semantic-release for whether a new release is necessary, and bailing if not
Fetching any existing branch protections for the configured branch, and temporarily deleting them if found
Running release-it
Restoring any temporarily deleted branch protections

Run JoshuaKGoldberg/release-it-action in a GitHub workflow after building your code and setting your npm token:

concurrency:
  group: ${{ github.workflow }}

jobs:
  release:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
          ref: main
      - run: npm build
      - env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.ACCESS_TOKEN }}
          NPM_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.NPM_TOKEN }}
        uses: JoshuaKGoldberg/[email protected]

name: Release

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

permissions:
  contents: write
  id-token: write

Options

Key	Type	Default	Description
`branch`	`string`	`"main"`	Branch to delete and recreate branch protections on (unless `skip-branch-protections`).
`git-user-email`	`string`	`${<git-user-name>}@users.noreply.github.com`	`git config user.email` value for Git commits.
`git-user-name`	`string`	`${github.context.actor}`	`git config user.name` value for Git commits.
`github-token`	`string`	`${GITHUB_TOKEN}`	GitHub token (PAT) with repo and workflow permissions.
`npm-token`	`string`	`${NPM_TOKEN}`	npm access token with the automation role.
`skip-branch-protections`	`boolean`	`false`	Whether to skip deleting and recreating branch protections.

Node API

release-it-action can be installed as a dependency that exports a releaseItAction function:

npm i release-it-action

import { releaseItAction } from "release-it-action";

await releaseItAction({
	branch: "main",
	githubToken: process.env.GITHUB_TOKEN,
	gitUserEmail: "[email protected]",
	gitUserName: "YourUsername",
	npmToken: process.env.NPM_TOKEN,
	owner: "YourUsername",
	repo: "your-repository",
});

Note that all non-boolean inputs are required and do not have default values in the Node API.

FAQs

Why does the checkout action run on the branch with full history?

release-it-action needs to run on the latest commit on the default/release branch and with a concurrency group. Otherwise, if multiple workflows are triggered quickly, later workflows might not include release commits from earlier workflows.

Why does this delete and recreate branch protections?

It would be great to instead either change which branch is protected or have a native GitHub API to disable a branch protection rule. Neither exist at time of writing. If you know that one now exists, please do file an issue!

See: