docToolchain VS changesets

An implementation of the docs-as-code approach, docToolchain is a collection of scripts that makes it easy to create and maintain powerful technical documentation. It is a popular open-source project that uses jBake under the hood as the SSG. docToolchain can publish to Confluence, generate PDF using an Asciidoctor plugin, and more.

[1] Gradle based, which is probably why it's fading a little bit. https://github.com/docToolchain/docToolchain

In addition to this, the focus will be laid on exporting data and integration with other tooling. This includes a convenience library for programmatic processing, static site export, and a set of recipes, e.g. for integrating with things like docToolchain.

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.