PR Release Action

GitHub Action for creating semantic releases automatically when a pull request gets merged. The commit message format should follow the conventional commits specification.

A prerelease can be created from a PR by commenting it with /prerelease. This creates a new release with a configurable prerelease identifier and "Pre-release" tag on the GitHub release. If you have configured prerelease_id (for example "rc") it will be used to prefix the prerelease increment like this: 1.2.3-rc.0.

If you have existing releases then at least your latest release should follow the major.minor.patch format, otherwise the versioning will start from 0.0.1.

The release title is obtained from the pull request title and the release body also starts with the body message from the PR. Release notes are automatically generated and grouped by commit types ("test", "docs", "ci" and "chore" commits are excluded). Note also that "fix(review)" commits are excluded from release notes and "fix(deps)" are collected under "Dependencies" header. You can opt out of the release note generation with the release_notes input variable.

You can use the action with Dependabot pull requests as the list of Dependabot commands is stripped away from the release.

Configuration

The action should be configured to run on closed pull requests and issue comments. The action is able to distinguish when PR has been merged and when it has been closed without merging.

Here is an example workflow file:

name: Release

on:
  pull_request:
    types: ["closed"]
  issue_comment:

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Clone PR branch
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Create release
        uses: elisa-actions/pr-release@v1
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          prerelease_id: "rc"

If you use the dry_run option then the workflow can also run on other pull request events than closed. In this case only the bump level and new version number are outputted. This lets you check whether a new release would be created or not for pull request events such as synchronize or labeled and use the outputs in the next steps.

Inputs

name	required	description
github_token	yes	GitHub token
prerelease_id	no	Prerelease identifier
dry_run	no	Skip release creation, set outputs
release_notes	no	Include release notes (default: true)
release_draft	no	Publish releases as draft
prerelease_draft	no	Publish prereleases as draft
update_major_tag	no	Update the major tag to point to the current release

Outputs

name	description
bump	Bump level
version	Release version
release_title	Release title
release_body	Release body
release_id	ID of the created release
release_url	HTML URL of the release
release_upload_url	Upload URL of the release