Actions Suite for Releasing

[damacus]

Overview

There are lots of tools like please-release which help release software.

What they don't do well, and I haven't seen done well yet, is an auto-release system (think Sous-Chefs release system slick-ness) that allows GitHub Actions to be updated easily.

Spec

• Reads tags on issues/PRs to know if it's a release.
• Doesn't require/rely on conventional commits
  • The overhead for Conventional commits is pretty high for the community, admins/moderators can put tags on PRs
• Can manage the actions.yml file without needing an external action
• Takes a CHANGELOG entry from a dedicated PR section to update the changelog.
  • Notes: GitHub releases can auto-populate based on PR comments/titles

[damacus]

This has come off the back of trying to get this workflow working and not finding anything great

The Test Kitchen Org has a similar problem, but that's with their Gems. Again please-release is fine, But it's definitely not as nice as the Sous-Chefs auto-release system,.

[xorima]

The Sous-Chefs release system has 1 issue/bug bear of mine which is requiring us to manually update the CHANGELOG.md file to provide release notes for the release. We should look to use the normal Pull Request description/Title in Github for this (As it can easily be changed by an admin/member of the org as well) which should provide a better user experiance.

[damacus]

• Naming: temporary naming during development. Then permanent once finished.
• Language: TS/JS with vendored dependencies
• Circular Dependencies: Option to skip releases. (special tags as per Sous-Chefs releases)
• Skipping Releases: Default it to always release But have an option to Skip release

[damacus]

Actions Required:

Release Creator

• Only supports yaml files
• Checks main for changes
• On merge to main, create a PR that pushes the Docker container (example) then changes the action.yaml to point to the new container
• Supports: pure Yaml Action, Docker + Yaml
• Gets release notes from the Pull Request

Label Validator

• Mostly documentation on what tags we need/support

[xorima]

For testing actions locally looking into: https://github.com/GuillaumeFalourd/poc-github-actions/blob/main/.github/workflows/36-local-action.yml or act otherwise could be useful

[damacus]

Commenting on PRs can either use this, or take inspiration from it

https://github.com/peter-evans/create-or-update-comment