release-plan

The most contributor friendly and hands-off release tool there is.

Features

• ✨ No manual steps¹
  • release from anywhere²
• 🤖 Everything is automated via GH Action Workflows³
• 🔐 No need to give maintainers access to npm⁴
• 📦 PNPM and monorepo support by default
  • also supports non-pnpm repos
• 🚀 Release preview PR
  • release via merge of the release preview PR
• 📝 Automatic changelog
  • changelog entries editable by editing PR titles

This allows folks with GH Maintainer access to preview and release to npm without actually needing to have any keys locally on their machine (or access to the npm package, which makes management of the repo separate from the npm package easy and encouraged).

Usage & Installation

Automated

Use create-release-plan-setup, see the README over there for detailed instructions.

If you already have a local GITHUB_AUTH token,

npx create-release-plan-setup@latest 

does all the setup for you (aside from repo-configuration (see here))

how to get a GITHUB_AUTH token

You can create a GitHub personal access token here

Or, if you use the gh CLI, you can temporarily expose a token to your local terminal shell via:

export GITHUB_AUTH=$(gh auth token);

This command will create

.github/workflows/
  - plan-release.yml
  - publish.yml
RELEASE.md

which is responsible for automating the process that you'd run through manually below.

Manual

npm i --save-dev release-plan

To use release-plan you need to have a valid GITHUB_AUTH environment variable that has the repo permission. This allows release-plan to check what PRs have been merged since the last release and plan the release accordingly.

1. Run npx release-plan explain-plan. If there are unlabeled PRs that need to be released it will complain and show you a list of them. Each PR needs to be labeled with one of:

   • breaking
   • enhancement
   • bug
   • documentation
   • internal

2. Once all the PRs are labeled, release-plan will instead show you the release plan, explaining which packages are getting released, at which versions, and why.

3. If you disagree with the plan, you can modify the list of changes before using it to explain-plan or prepare a release:

   • npx release-plan gather-changes > /tmp/changelog
   • edit /tmp/changelog
   • npx release-plan --from-stdin < /tmp/changelog

   For example, this can be necessary if a PR that's labeled breaking touches multiple packages and only one of those packages is actually a breaking change. In that case you can take the other package names out of the description of the PR.

4. Once you're happy with the plan, run npx release-plan prepare. This will edit CHANGELOG.md, bump the version numbers in package.json files, and create a file named .release-plan.json. Make a PR with these changes.

5. Once the PR is merged, in a clean local repo at the merge commit, run npx release-plan publish. If you need an otp for your release you can provide that to the publish command like this npx release-plan publish --otp=123456

Comparison

Note that we take the stance of reducing friction for new contributors (regardless of how new to GitHub they are), we want to optimize for the contribution, and assume that maintainers can handle a little bit of process -- and with this stance, changesets is the most work out of this comparison.

Additionally, this comparison assumes the recommended configuration for each release tool.

release-plan	release-it (requires computer)	changesets (requires computer)
add a label to a PR	same	have the repo cloned
merge the PR	same	add the remote of the PR-submitter to your local git
		checkout the branch
		run pnpm changeset
		write something about the change
		push it back up to the PR-submitter's branch
ensure the PR title is what you want in the changelog	same
	have the repo cloned
	update / sync repo locally
	run npx release -it
automation creates a preview PR		same
merging that preview PR does the actual release		same

Needed Access:

	release-plan	release-it	changesets
NPM_TOKEN	only ci	local	only ci
GH_TOKEN	only ci	local	only ci

Note that while it's recommended to use release-plan with full automation, release-plan can be used locally, as described in the Manual Installation section of this README.

Summary:

	release-plan	release-it	changesets
number of steps	5	6	8
Downsides	n/a	maintainers need admin access to both GitHub and NPM requires a computer	requires push access to the submitter's PR, or potentially risk losing steam from the contributor to ask them to create the changeset more up-front work required per change/PR hard to go back and add a changeset and have it associated with the PR correctly (maybe impossible), so forgetting to add changesets pre-merge can totally ruin the accuracy of changeset's changelog requires a computer

Origins

This package was originally developed to help release Embroider and was extracted so everyone can use it 🎉

Footnotes

1. after initial setup, which is already mostly automated. ↩

2. You can release from bed, the mall, the porcelain, anywhere! No need for a computer! (assuming you have a smart phone) ↩

3. While GitHub Actions is the default setup via create-release-plan-setup ↩

4. The NPM token can be granular, and the package needs to have its "Publishing access" configured to either "Don't require two-factor authentication" or, "Require two-factor authentication or an automation or granular access token" (recommended). This can be configured under https://www.npmjs.com/package/{package-name}/access ↩