Release pull request action

This action is used to create release from commit history with

• Title based on release branch name or latest github release
• Description containing changelog based on commit messages (conventional commits messages)

What it does

• It creates pull request with title of release branch version
• It generates change log from commits history, which can be shared in slack
• It creates github release
• It posts changelog to slack

Action input

Name	Description	Example	Default	Required
github-token	Github token with repository scope permissions	${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}	NO DEFAULT	yes
changelog-scopes	Scopes, that will be show in changelog	{"Worker": ["worker"]}	NO DEFAULT	yes
changelog-method	Source from which to create changelog	pull_request_description	NO DEFAULT	yes
slack-token	Slack token with sufficient scopes	${{ secrets.SLACK_TOKEN }}	NO DEFAULT	no
slack-channel	Slack channel ID	XXXXXX	NO DEFAULT	no
release-name-method	Whether to fetch release name from branch name or bump minor of last release	branch	branch	no
create-release-pull-request	Whether to create release pull request	true	false	no
create-github-release	Whether to create github release	true	false	no
base-branch	Based branch where pull request will be created	master	master	no
release-name-prefix	Prepend prefix to release name (version)	v	v	no
github-changelog-file-destination	Where to store github changelog on filesystem	github_changelog.md	changelog.md	no
open-ai-token	Experimental feature see section experimental feature.	token	NO_DEFAULT	no
fetch-author-slack-ids	Fetch Slack IDs of commit authors in the changelog	true	false	no

Input details

• changelog-method can be one of:

  • pull_request_description - Changelog will taken from pull request's description (for pull_request trigger). Description can be edited manually. The resulting changelog text is taken from between <!-- CHANGELOG --> comments
  • pull_request_commits - Changelog will taken from pull request's commit messages (for pull_request trigger)
  • pull_request_title - Changelog will be taken from pull request's title (for pull_request trigger)
  • commits_compare - Changelog will taken from comparison of commit messages between 2 branches

• both slack-token and slack-channel must be set to send message to Slack (plus the token needs chat.postMessage scope)

• slack-token must be set to fetch user Slack IDs (plus the token needs users:read and users:read.email scopes)

• release-name-method can be on of:

  • branch - parse release name from branch name (i.e. release/v1.2.3 -> v.1.2.3)
  • tag - parse release name from latest and bump minor (i.e. v1.2.3 -> v.1.3.3)

• github-changelog-file-destination controls the github-changelog-file-destination output

Action output

Name	Description	Example
github-changelog	Changelog content	some cool feature
github-changelog-file-destination	Changelog file destination	./changelog.md
github-changelog-authors	Changelog commit authors as JSON string	[{name:"Tobiáš Potoček",email:"[email protected]",slackId:"U0xyz"}]

Experimental feature

An experimental feature will rewrite the final changelog using GPT-3 davinci language model. If you want to try, you need to pass the open-ai-token action input with your API token from openai.com.

Example usage

Example bellow opens pull request from head to base branch with changelog in it's description

name: Release pull request

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - release/**

jobs:
  open-release-pr:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: run release-pr-action
        uses: apify/release-pr-action
        with:
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          changelog-scopes: '{"Worker": ["worker"]}'
          create-release-pull-request: true
          changelog-method: commits_compare

Example bellow gets pull request description, parses changelog out of it, creates github release and sends changelog to slack

name: Release pull request

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - release/**

jobs:
  open-release-pr:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: run release-pr-action
        uses: apify/release-pr-action
        with:
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          slack-token: ${{ secrets.slackToken }}
          changelog-scopes: '{"Worker": ["worker"]}'
          slack-channel: 'XXXCCCVVVV'
          changelog-method: pull_request_description
          create-github-release: true

Contribution

Developing Github Actions is tricky. You have essentially two options:

1. Use something like act to run actions and workflows locally.
2. Push changes to GitHub and let it run there.

For the second option, this repo contains a test workflow that will run the release-pr-action on every PR push. As the action will run on your actual PR, create-release-pull-request is by default false so that it doesn't override your PR title and description.

Note that you need to manually build the code and commit the dist folder with the built code.

Local setup

1. Run fnm use (or nvm, or any other node manager you use).
2. Run npm install.
3. Run npm run watch.

Development workflow

1. Update code in ./src.
2. Wait for build to finish.
3. Commit all changes including ./dist folder.
4. Push changes to GitHub.
5. Observe the action results.
6. Repeat.

Feel free to change the test workflow to suit your needs, but before merging make sure it's configured with some reasonable defaults that will work for the next person making changes.

Tip: To avoid constantly switching to GitHub UI, you can use an IDE integration, such as GitHub Actions Manager for WebStorm, or GitHub Actions for VSCode.

Submit changes

1. If needed, run npm run build and commit and push any remaining changes.
2. Run npm run test.
3. Merge the PR.
4. Publish a new version of action using new release (It needs to be done manually).