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Automating Changesets

While changesets are designed to work with a fully manual process, it also provides tools to help automate these releases. These can be broken into two major decisions:

  1. How do I want to ensure pull requests have changesets?
  2. How do I run the version and publish commands?

Here we have a quick-start recommended workflow, with more

Recommended Automation Flow

  1. Install our changeset bot into your repository.
  2. Add the github action to your repository.

How do I want to ensure pull requests have changesets?

Changesets are committed to files, so a diligent reviewer can always technically tell if a changeset is absent and request one be added. As humans though, a file not being there is easy to miss. We recommend adding some way to detect the presence or absence of changesets on a pull request so you don't have to, as well as highlight it to pull-request makers so you don't have to.

This has two main approaches.

Non-blocking

In this approach, a pull request may be merged if no changeset is present, and a missing changeset does not create a red build. Our github changeset bot is the best way to prompt for changesets without making them blocking. As a handy extra feature, they give you a link to add your own changeset as a maintainer to smooth over merging pull requests without waiting for the contributor to add a changeset.

Blocking

Sometimes, you may want to make CI fail if no changeset is present to ensure no PR can be merged without a changeset. To do this:

In your CI process, add a step that runs:

changeset status --since=main

This will exit with exit code 1 if there have been no new changesets since main.

In some cases, you may want to merge a change without doing any releases (such as when you only change tests or build tools). In this case, you can run changeset --empty. This will add a special changeset that does not release anything.

How do I run the version and publish commands?

We have a github action that

  • creates a version PR, then keeps it up to date, recreating it when merged. This PR always has an up-to-date run of changeset version
  • Optionally allows you to do releases when changes are merged to the base branch.

If you don't want to use this action, the manual workflow we recommend for running the version and publish commands is:

  • A release coordinator (RC) calls to stop any merging to the base branch
  • The RC pulls down the base branch, runs changeset version, then makes a new PR with the versioning changes
  • The versioning changes are merged back into the base branch
  • The RC pulls the base branch again and runs changeset publish
  • The RC runs git push --follow-tags to push the release tags back
  • The RC unblocks merging to the base branch

This is a lot of steps and is quite finicky (we have to pull from the base branch twice). Feel free to finesse it to your own circumstances.