release-tools

A tiny collection of release helpers that will help you bumping and publishing your package without too much hassles.

The projects ships a bunch of source code that get's used by very thin CLI wrappers. This way it is possible to actually use the sources independently from the command line, which can be handy if you want to integrate the logic into your own work flow.

Installation

npm install -g release-tools

Executables

Right now this project is very npm focussed but could in theory be used with every other dependency management tool as well.

npm_bump

This executable is doing the following steps:

• It checks if your project contains a CHANGELOG.md file.
• If there is a changelog, it will check if the changelog contains the needle ## Upcoming and replaces it with the new version and the current timestamp.
• If there is a changelog, it will commit the changes in changelog with the commit message Add changes in version: v<version>.
• It will now run npm version (which sets the version of your package.json to the new value), commit the change with the commit message Bump to version: v<version> and finally create a tag for the new version á la v<version>.
• Finally it pushes your changes and your tags to the remote server (via git).

Usage

npm_bump 1.2.3 # Usage with a fixed version
npm_bump --bugfix # Usage with options

Options

• --bugfix, --patch increases the third fragment of the version string (e.g. 1.2.3 to 1.2.4)
• --minor increases the second fragment of the version string and sets the third fragment to 0 (e.g. 1.2.3 to 1.3.0)
• --major increases the first fragment of the version string and sets the second and third fragment to 0 (e.g. 1.2.3 to 2.0.0)
• --skip-push will disable the pushing to the remote git server
• --auto enables automatic version detection. See below for more information
• --auto-fallback defines the to-be-bumped fragment in case of failing auto detection

npm_release

This executable is doing the following steps:

• Call npm_bump. See the above steps.
• Release the package to npm via npm publish.

Automatic change type detection

The flag --auto will parse the commits since the last git tag and checks the subject and the body of the commit messages for some specific markers:

• [major] will generate a major version bump
• [minor], [feature] will generate a minor version bump
• [patch], [bugfix], [fix] will generate a patch version bump

If no change type is detected – because the markers are missing – you can also specify a fallback type which is picked up in such cases:

npm_release --auto --auto-fallback minor

This will bump the minor version in case no marker has been found.

Example

Let's assume your lib is currently on version 1.0.0 (aka the package.json contains that particular version number and a git tag v1.0.0 exists). You now commit with the following messages:

[feature] Add new functionality
[patch] Fix readme

If you run npm_release --auto now, it will bump the second version fragment aka set the version to 1.1.0. This happens because of the [feature] in one of the git commit message.

Exported functions

npm.bump

This function is called by npm_bump and expects an object as first parameter:

var releaseTools = require('release-tools');
 
releaseTools.npm.bump({ version: '1.2.3' }); // Change version to a specific value.
releaseTools.npm.bump({ bugfix: true });     // Change version to next bugfix version.
releaseTools.npm.bump({ minor: true });      // change version to next minor release.
releaseTools.npm.bump({ major: true });      // Change version to next major release.

npm.release

This function is called by npm_release and expects an object as first parameter:

releaseTools.npm.release({ version: '1.2.3' }); // Change version to a specific value.
releaseTools.npm.release({ bugfix: true });     // Change version to next bugfix version.
releaseTools.npm.release({ minor: true });      // change version to next minor release.
releaseTools.npm.release({ major: true });      // Change version to next major release.

One word about changelogs

Many of my projects are (roughly) following the schema of keepachangelog.

License

MIT