semantic-release VS release-please

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

Conventional Commits

We've covered everything about writing well-formatted and structured code without worrying too much about it anymore. The only part we haven't explored yet is linting commit messages. Commitlint will help us here. It allows you to configure any rules you want for the commit message, but we're going to use the Conventional Commits specification, one of the most popular conventions you'll find.

Commit Management with Conventional Commits: The Conventional Commits methodology is adopted to maintain a clear and structured record of changes with the help of commitlint.

Validate if the commit titles adhere to the Conventional Commits Specification in Merge requests.

Check out https://www.conventionalcommits.org

FYI there is already a popular tool that does just this with a very similar name: https://github.com/googleapis/release-please

The feature commit should have a clear defined message - Don't re-invent here - There exists a fairly used and accepted convention called Conventional Commits, so we are going to use that.

Check out https://github.com/googleapis/release-please