How to properly release multiple versions

[ZauberNerd]

Hi there 👋

We want to migrate from our custom release bot to a mixture of auto and backport, but we are having trouble properly configuring auto.

We have a lerna monorepo with multiple release branches and want to be able to:

• release prereleases on the default branch
• release features and bug fixes on version branches

So we basically have one "active" version which receives new features, one "maintenance" version which receives bug fixes and one "prerelease" version.

Our workflow should look like this:

• All PRs should be made against the default branch (with the exception of bug fixes for a specific version)
• Features and bug fixes are backported to the latest version branch
• critical bug fixes are also backported to the maintenance version branch
• Releases from the version branches are triggered either via workflow_dispatch or via milestone.closed events
• Releases from the default branch should be released as prereleases

We had to change some default configs to be able to adapt to our workflow:

• We had to rename our repository default branch from main to next because auto uses the branch name as prerelease tag
• we had to rename our existing version branches from v14, v15, to version-14, version-15 because we didn't want to risk other branches that start with v to be mistaken as version branches by auto

Here is the auto config we're using:

"auto": {
  "plugins": [
    "npm",
    "conventional-commits"
  ],
  "noDefaultLabels": true,
  "versionBranches": true,
  "baseBranch": "version-16",
  "prereleaseBranches": [
    "next"
  ]
},

Explanation of config options:

• We are publishing to an internal npm repository
• We adhere to conventional commits
• We don't want to use any of the labeling features of auto (we haven't found a way to entirely disable them, so maybe noDefaultLabels is good enough)
• We do want to be able to maintain different version branches
• We want to publish @latest releases from the currently active version branch (in our case version-16) so we set it as baseBranch
• And we do want to publish prereleases from the next branch

We have been able to make prereleases when calling auto shipit from the default branch (next).
But we have not been able to release a new major version.

For that we have committed a BREAKING CHANGE and called auto shipit on the default branch, but it fails with the following error message:

auto shipit
Error: Running command 'git' with args [rev-list, --boundary, next...version-16, --left-only] failed
fatal: ambiguous argument 'next...version-16': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.
Use '--' to separate paths from revisions, like this:
'git <command> [<revision>...] -- [<file>...]'
at ChildProcess.<anonymous> (/virtual/jenkins/workspace/fea/act-runners/hops-test/target/node_modules/@auto-it/core/dist/utils/exec-promise.js:[5](https://act-app.xing.io/fea/hops-test/build/204#L9_5)8:31)
at ChildProcess.emit (node:events:527:28)
at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:291:12)Error
at Object.execPromise [as default] (/virtual/jenkins/workspace/fea/act-runners/hops-test/target/node_modules/@auto-it/core/dist/utils/exec-promise.js:15:22)
at Auto.next (/virtual/jenkins/workspace/fea/act-runners/hops-test/target/node_modules/@auto-it/core/dist/auto.js:8[6](https://act-app.xing.io/fea/hops-test/build/204#L9_6)3:5[7](https://act-app.xing.io/fea/hops-test/build/204#L9_7))
at processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:[9](https://act-app.xing.io/fea/hops-test/build/204#L9_9)6:5)
at async Auto.shipit (/virtual/jenkins/workspace/fea/act-runners/hops-test/target/node_modules/@auto-it/core/dist/auto.js:[10](https://act-app.xing.io/fea/hops-test/build/204#L9_10)26:27)
at async execute (/virtual/jenkins/workspace/fea/act-runners/hops-test/target/node_modules/auto/dist/run.js:71:17)
at async Object.runCli (/virtual/jenkins/workspace/fea/act-runners/hops-test/target/node_modules/auto/dist/run.js:[12](https://act-app.xing.io/fea/hops-test/build/204#L9_12)5:5)

The documentation about managing old versions seems to suggest that auto will create the version-16 branch, which in the error message above did not happen and thus git failed to find the ref.

Any help would be appreciated.