Generate draft release on GitHub with GitHub Actions
I was trying to find a way to do GitHub releases with GitHub Actions or GitLab CI. When I happen to find semantic-release project. One of the benefits of GitHub Actions is that the majority of its users open source their workflows by default. I was able to kick start my workflow for keeping up with releases thanks to code from benmvp, a GitHub user and keynote speaker. This was a huge help with setting up our CI to create drafted releases directly to GitHub Release page.
name: Release
on:
push:
branches:
- master
jobs:
main:
name: Draft Release
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Checkout
uses: actions/checkout@v1
- name: Use Node v12
uses: actions/setup-node@v1
with:
node-version: 12
- name: Install dependencies
run: npm ci
- name: Double check unit tests
run: npm test
env:
CI: true
- name: Double check integration tests
run: npm run integrate
env:
CI: true
- name: Build package
run: npm run build
- name: Publish new version to GitHub Release
env:
GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
run: npx semantic-release
If you take a look at that workflow, you can see at the bottom that he’s using the npx command to leverage semantic-release directly with its CLI. GitHub Actions workflows allow you to run set runner environments and run shell commands. That solves the one problem, but I’m a big fan of actually automating my changelog as well.
I leverage actions to generate my release notes for projects. I discovered that it provides a changelog and bumps the version number in package.json file.
Do the Github release from Gitlab CI pipline.
We can also use a lot simpler and more universal solution if we go with GitHub Cli tool. For this, to work we will need to create a base Docker image where this job of ours will run. You will also need to set GitlabCI environment variable “GITHUB_TOKEN” with your private token with access to full repo: and org:read
After this, you should be able to run the job and it will create a draft of your release. If you want to attach any files to the release simply specify the path at the end of “gh release” line with ./ if stored in your repository root folder.
Gitlab CI example job.
script:
- gh config set prompt disabled
- VERSION=$(jq -r .version path/to_your_version_file/package.json)
- gh release create --repo OWNER/PROJECTNAME --draft v${VERSION} --title "v${VERSION}"