thoughtful-release

Create high quality releases with less work

People like substack encourage you to divide the functionality of large monolithic modules into reasonable parts and publish each of those as module on there own. That's what I did when I separated swagger-to-html into bootprint and three template modules and then extracted multiple modules (i.e. the customize-family) from bootprint, so that it was easy to implement thought on this basis as well.

The problem is, that now there are 10 modules to maintain instead of just one. The overhead for releasing new versions is about the same for each package. This module is a toolkit to make the following tasks easier, thus increasing the package quality and reducing the workload for a release:

Generate changelog: Changelog generation is inspired by the Ghost git workflow
QA git hooks: This can be done using the ghooks package. Thougthful has no builtins for that.
Git workflow: Git hooks to prevent commiting to master directly. Support for cleaning up the history before merging to master
Release workflow: (not yet implemented) A command to run tests, generate changelog, bump versions and publish to npm, similar to the release-tools-package

Installation

npm install -g thoughtful-release

CLI options

NodeJS compatibility notes

This package will always support the latest version of NodeJS and as well as the current LTS version. In the future, it will not be considered a breaking change to drop support of a pre-LTS version of NodeJS.

Calling thoughtful --help will print a command-line reference:

Usage: thoughtful [options] [command]

Options:
  -V, --version                    output the version number
  -h, --help                       output usage information

Commands:
  changelog [options]              Update the file CHANGELOG.md of the module in the current directory.
  precommit                        Perform precommit-checks (locked branches...). Return non-zero exit-code if something is wrong
  sequence-editor <filename>       "Editor" for the rebase todos (replacing "pick" with "squash") with no interaction
  cleanup-history [target-branch]  Rebase the current branch onto another branch, condensing the whole branch into a single commit.

Please refer to the command line reference of this project for details about the commands.

Supporting the git workflow

You can enforce the above workflow using git-hooks and Thoughtful. Have a look at the git-workflow-document.

Generate changelog

You can use the command thoughtful-release -o -a as a version script in the package.json. On version bumps, a CHANGELOG.md is then automatically generated from git commits. Before it is commited to the git repository, an editor is opened to let you review and modify the changelog.

The editor-command is taken from environment variables

${THOUGHTFUL_CHANGELOG_EDITOR}
with a fallback to ${EDITOR}
with a fallback to vi.

License

thoughtful-release is published under the MIT-license.

See LICENSE.md for details.

Release-Notes

For release notes, see CHANGELOG.md

Contributing guidelines

See CONTRIBUTING.md.