semantic-release VS release-drafter

I'm trying to improve the security behind our release process, which uses semantic-release. During this process, it creates a change log which is committed to the repo, publishes a package and a few other things.

Conventional commits specification contains a set of rules for creating an explicit commit history, which makes it easier to write automated tools on top of, for example, semantic release. You can manually follow this convention in your project or use a tool to assist you, such as Commitizen.

When working with JavaScript projects, managing version numbers and commit messages is important for the maintainability of the project. Since 2020 I have been the main developer of Atomic Calendar Revive a highly customisable Home Assistant calendar card, I found maintaining versions and releases to be cumbersome until recently. In this article, I will introduce the commitizen and semantic-release packages for creation or appropriate commit messages and semantic versioning. I will also provide examples of how I am currently using these packages to streamline my release workflow and project maintenance.

To further streamline deployments, I introduced semantic-release. This tool automates commit tagging and tracks changes since the previous version. As a result, deployments now occur only when new tags are present, saving us valuable minutes.

If your projects ar made in javascript and related tools, I'd suggest you to check: semantic-release

For releasing or publishing our code automatically, we will use the action Release Drafter

New release drafts are triggered after every commit is pushed to the main staging build. The drafted release (built with release drafter) will contain all the commits added since the previous release and a suggested new version which will follow the Semantic Versioning rules.

I am thinking I would have to create a GitHub release manually and then have a workflow listening on the "Release created" event, which would pull the image with the correct commit sha, tag it with the proper version and push it. Or using something like Release Drafter with a PR-based Git flow.

During 2021, we worked hard to improve it furthermore and add new functionality. We just released the latest version of cookietemple. It now includes (beside other templates for example an advanced C++ template or a Java CLI template) a modern python template using poetry, nox (nox-poetry), automatic docs setup as well as many cool and modern GitHub actions, like ReleaseDrafter (https://github.com/release-drafter/release-drafter).

Every commit pushed to the main branch will trigger a staging build. In addition to this, every commit pushed to the main branch will draft a new release on GitHub with the help of the release drafter.

We are always actively working on the configuration for Renovate and will continue to fine-tune it. Having pull requests created for every upstream version change will also optimise the generation of automated changelogs (using the excellent Release Drafter GitHub Action we were already using on Lagoon).

I wanted to provide a way to be able to easily create release notes, to enhance transparency on what we are delivering. I chose to use a tool called Release Drafter in our workflow. I wanted to configure how labels would be used in every repository, and for that, we standardised all labels across all repositories. I use: docs, dependencies, bug, feature, and maintenance.

release-drafter / release-drafter