GitHub GitHub Checkout, 13 Oct 2021

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From YouTube: AUTOMATED Release Notes - GitHub Checkout

Description

GitHub is where developers come to learn and celebrate what’s new in open source, and where maintainers share, collaborate and celebrate their community’s work. One of the most important parts of the software development life cycle is delivering your software to those who use it. Today, we are sharing some recent improvements we’ve made to GitHub Releases in a new public beta to make it easier to create and communicate compelling, high-quality releases while encouraging collaboration and engagement from the community.

https://github.blog/2021-10-04-beta-github-releases-improving-release-experience/

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A

What's up y'all it's b dougie and I've got a feature for you to check out so github releases is a feature. That's been around for quite some years now, but we've got a actually exciting update miles. Why don't you go ahead and take it away.

B

Thanks brian um hello internet glad to have you around I'm here today to talk about something I've been working on for last number of months with a large number of other folks here at github, which is some pretty significant improvements to how github releases work. um So here you can go, you can see a repository of mine called node osc.

B

This is a repo that's used by some people, not a ton of people enough people that I feel comfortable doing a live demo with it, and we could first of all, you could come in and immediately see the new releases ui that we've got, which is pretty exciting we could see highlights of who contributors are. We could see that we have notes that are being automatically generated.

B

This is different than the old design with tags, but I realized today with note osc that there's a small change I'd like to make I've got these workflows for generating creating releases and I'm actually using npm 7 now- and I think it's about time for me to upgrade to node 16 inside of my release.

B

Script so you'll see I'll just go here and I'm going to bump um to 16 for the release script and I'm going to I'm going to start a commit and I'm going to make a new branch um create release to node.js 16..

B

I can go ahead and propose that change and I'm just going to write. um You know a message here that helps us know why we're doing this pull request I'll, create the pull request and we're going to see.

B

I actually have a number of actions that are going to run, or these workflows and actions to go and test across all the operating systems and all the versions of node.

B

And while I know none of this touches this particular code, I like to have good hygiene in the repository.

B

So, let's let that run for a second and I'm going to show you something else really quickly, and here I've got this more of a toy repo called the release, notes test where we could see that I'm using a configuration in dot, github, slash release.yaml to do a slightly more advanced form of release, notes where we're creating individual categories with titles and using labels to sort content into those categories and we'll see we have the special label star, which will match basically anything that didn't match other labels.

B

So I'll go here to releases and I'll draft a new release and we already have a tag created of the 2.0.3 and I can click that or I can type it in and hit enter and we can see, we've got an existing tag, and so all that I want to do here is click auto, generate release, notes and now, amazingly, we have a title for the release and we click preview. We could see all these different changes. Some of them were breaking changes. Some of them were bug fixes. Some of them were other.

B

I can click publish release and we can see this awesome looking release that has all this amazing information about what happened.

B

If we go back to node osc we'll see here that we're ready to squash and merge this commit, which is great and so now I've landed this pr and I want to make a new release, so I've actually got a workflow in here also called bump version, which is what's known as a manually triggered workflow, which uses what's called a workflow dispatch.

B

So what this means is, if I go here and click on actions, I can click on bump version and right here is a little option for me to manually, run the workflow and I'm doing a patch release.

B

So I'm going to type patch and click run workflow, and it's going to take a second to kick off and now we're going to see that this bump version workflow has started click into it and we can see that it's starting to run and what this workflow does.

B

If we go back to the source text of it, is it's going to go ahead and it's going to check out the repository it's going to install all the dependencies and it's going to run the command npm version, which creates a new commit which bumps the version in the package json. It creates a tag and I'm just pushing it upstream now.

B

I am using a custom deploy key for this because I want to have another action workflow be triggered, um but there's a lot of different ways that you could do this and we're looking into ways also that we can make it a little bit more streamlined.

B

But if we come back here, we can see that the bump version is done and it pushed the tag and we can see right here. The tag kicked off. Another workflow called publish it's an npm and create release. So we actually just finished publishing that um package to npm the updated version and now it's creating the github release, which will just take a second and it checked out the code. It generated the release, note and 6.6.1 was created. So if we click back here on node osc, we could see there's a 6.6.1, a 6.1.6 release.

B

It's everything's there. We could see the change that you saw me do live just a few minutes ago. We've got a full change. Log, which you know is just that one commit and the commit. That's bumping, the version number um and everything here is ready to go. It's published to npm, we have a release on github and this will work whether I use that uh workflow to trigger it directly in the ui or if I cut the release locally and push the tag upstream.

B

So if this is something that you're interested in doing yourself, please feel free to take a look at node osc, to see how I implemented it or take a look at the docs to see other ways to get it done miles.

A

That was amazing, and I just want to reiterate for folks: not only can the audit general releases, but did I get it right that you could also generate these from actions and from the github api.

B

Yeah, that's correct! um So if we take a look right here, here's the workflow that I was using in node osc and you see we're doing a post request to releases which creates a release and we just passed generate release, notes true to have it generate those release, notes you can take a look at the creator, release api docs and to read more details and there's a few more things that you can change.

B

But if you just want the release notes and without creating a release, we also have an api for that and you could similarly see these inside of the release notes. This gives you a little bit more flexibility because you can not only select the target commit and the new tag name, but you can give the previous tag name in case. You want to generate release, notes that go over more than one release or you aren't following semver or it just didn't work out of the box for you.

B

You can also pass pass a custom configuration so if you've got a monorepo, let's say, and you maybe have five or six different projects within there and you want to generate unique release, notes for all of them. You can use that uh file path to have custom configuration, and finally, this is really good. If you are one of those people who like to check your change log into your release itself, this will allow you to generate those notes before creating the release. So you can, you know, have that information as part of the release itself.

A

uh And then my final question for you miles is: uh this is really awesome. When can we start using this stuff.

B

Yeah people can use this today, it's ready and available and turned on by default. um So please take a look play around with it and if you have any feedback, please head over to the github feedback discussions forum and we'd love to hear what you have to say and hopefully find a way uh to make it even better.

A

Amazing: well thanks for your time miles and folks, if you enjoyed features like this and getting updates on releases, stick around and watch the next video.