changesets VS action

In my circles, this is the go-to for release automation / changelogs: https://github.com/changesets/changesets

🦋 Publicando com changesets

Open source libraries and frameworks share a common necessity: the need to develop multiple packages cohesively and efficiently while managing their versioning and publishing to NPM. Nx has emerged as a go-to choice for handling such open source monorepos (as we'll explore further in the next section of this blog post). Until recently, one area Nx did not address directly was versioning and release management. Traditionally, this gap has been filled with tools like release-it, changesets, or custom Node scripts, similar to our approach in the Nx repository.

Doing these tasks by hand can quickly become a hassle. If you're open to receiving contributions from others, it can be an even bigger headache. In this post we'll cover how to use changesets to automate all of these steps.

For versioning we use changeset, but with fixed-packages. We have found that the user thinks updating and managing our dependencies much easier if they can just bump each package to the same version. (storybook, sanity follows this appoach). While it feels unintuitive that each package gets a major if just the CSS has breaking changes, the user don't really care. They just want to finish the chore of updating their dependencies fast, without having to understand the system that deeply. This also makes documenting the changes much easier!

Thanks for sharing this. Why should I choose that instead of Changesets that work like a charm?

You’re right this information would be better suited for for commit trailers. A lot more information can be put there as well. For the purpose of changelog generation, what it’s commonly used for, it could just as well be put in the trailers and not crammed into the subject. I personally prefer changesets though.

We'll use the changeset github action. I'll be using firebase for hosting in this example.

And since I'm lazy, and lazy is good, I actually use the excellent Changesets GitHub Action, which will do all of this for me, by way of a Pull Request it will automatically create (you will often find them in the Pull Requests tab of the Composer Suite monorepo.) I can just merge that Pull Request, and a couple of minutes later, my packages will be published to NPM, and GitHub Release entries are created for them, too!

Changesets on the other hand is a semver version management tool that integrates well with pnpm and yarn workspaces by looking at the workspace file and walking you through a wizard for setting up which packages have changed (and has a great GitHub Actions integration and bot for previewing which packages will be updated and how).

changesets has a very detailed instruction to implement their action into your GitHub workflows here https://github.com/changesets/action Or you can get my release.yml here release.yml.