semver VS standard-version

It seems to me that a lot of people are forgetting that when updating to next major version of a package, breaking changes are expected - that's the whole point of major version number in SemVer [1]. What they actually want is seamless updates (or never changing APIs, but that not possible in most situations, and also not what you want as a package developer - you want to be able to correct your API design mistakes). That requires a lot of work from the package developers.

Look for example how people at Remix do it: breaking changes are hidden behind future flags [2], so you a user can turn them on one by one and adapt their code on gradually without surprises. Another solution is creating codemods for upgrades. But how many open-source package developers are willing do to this extra work?

Same story with peer dependencies - they're completely fine, if package developers know how to use them.

As always, don't be mad at React, don't curse Npm, it's not their fault. There is no great package without great effort.

[1] https://semver.org/

You can always check the official Semantic Versioning Specification.

Using Semantic Versioning for version control.

Suppose our pre-pre-production environment is named STAGING, and our pre-production environment is named UAT. STAGING corresponds to the latest commit in the main branch - that's the 'bleeding edge'. UAT corresponds to the latest release candidate tag on the main branch. In semantic versioning, this would be achieved by adding the suffix -rc.N to the name of the release it's targeting. For example, if our goal is to create production release v12.0.0, our UAT environment commits would be tagged v12.0.0-rc.1, then v12.0.0-rc.2, and so on. Suppose on v12.0.0-rc.5 we finally feel confident enough to push to production. We would then add the tag v12.0.0 to the same commit, which would constitute a full release and then be automatically deployed to production.

SemVer.org

If you don't know what semantic versioning is, I suggest you read up on it. In a nutshell, it is a standard/guideline for defining version numbers and how to increase them:

We know that our packages need to have a version. This version follows a format called semantic versioning. This is where the job called generate-version comes in. The output of this job is a version number that will be used when we publish our package in the package-and-publish-lib job.

I frequently need to set a semantic versioning version number when building ASP.NET Core API projects, then read or report this at runtime.

Using Conventional Commits ⭐ as a standard for your commit messages, makes Semantic Versioning 🔖 as easy as can be, with tools like Conventional Changelog 📄 Standard Version 🔖 and Semantic Release 📦🚀

Dive deeper into the world of Husky with the official documentation. Explore the capabilities of Standard Version through its comprehensive documentation. Unravel the mysteries of semantic-release with its detailed documentation. Discover the versatility of bumpp with its comprehensive documentation.

We can use standard-version tool to generate a changelog, bump the version of app and create a new tag automatically.

There are many great tools to help with automation here, some of them are action-semantic-pull-request to enforce conventional commits and standard version to bump the version and create a changelog according to the conventional commits.

I tried gitmoji and followed Make everyone in your project write beautiful commit messages using commitlint and commitizen by @sohandutta, but end up using the setting in this article because it's not compatible to changelog generation of standard-version (Ref: Issue #859)

As a bonus point, the issues you create in your repository can also serve as part of the documentation. You can outline new features there and you will even be able to generate changelogs from the merged pull requests (like I do using conventional-changelog/standard-version).

There’s also a husky precommit hook with ESlint and Prettier fixing and formatting changed code on every commit with lint-staged which makes sure malformed code doesn't even make it to the Pull Request. Combined with standard-version and strict commit messages it makes releasing and changelog generation a breeze. For a contributor the workflow is as smooth as:

But you can also automate even more, if, for example, you write according to Conventional Commits, you can also automate the creation of tags using the standard-version library.

# Changelog All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file. See \[standard-version\](https://github.com/conventional-changelog/standard-version) for commit guidelines. ## 1.1.0 (2021-07-12) ### Features * **new-feature:** add a new-feature to our project 11c0322

Standard Version