Release Please automates CHANGELOG generation, the creation of GitHub releases, and version bumps for your projects.

It does so by parsing your git history, looking for Conventional Commit messages, and creating release PRs.

It does not handle publication to package managers or handle complex branch management.

Rather than continuously releasing what's landed to your default branch, release-please maintains Release PRs:

These Release PRs are kept up-to-date as additional work is merged. When you're ready to tag a release, simply merge the release PR. Both squash-merge and merge commits work with Release PRs.

When the Release PR is merged, release-please takes the following steps:

1. Updates your changelog file (for example CHANGELOG.md), along with other language specific files (for example package.json).
2. Tags the commit with the version number
3. Creates a GitHub Release based on the tag

You can tell where the Release PR is in its lifecycle by the status label on the PR itself:

• autorelease: pending is the initial state of the Release PR before it is merged
• autorelease: tagged means that the Release PR has been merged and the release has been tagged in GitHub
• autorelease: snapshot is a special state for snapshot version bumps
• autorelease: published means that a GitHub release has been published based on the Release PR (release-please does not automatically add this tag, but we recommend it as a convention for publication tooling).

Release Please assumes you are using Conventional Commit messages.

The most important prefixes you should have in mind are:

• fix: which represents bug fixes, and correlates to a SemVer patch.
• feat: which represents a new feature, and correlates to a SemVer minor.
• feat!:, or fix!:, refactor!:, etc., which represent a breaking change (indicated by the !) and will result in a SemVer major.

Release Please allows you to represent multiple changes in a single commit, using footers:

feat: adds v4 UUID to crypto

This adds support for v4 UUIDs to the library.

fix(utils): unicode no longer throws exception
  PiperOrigin-RevId: 345559154
  BREAKING-CHANGE: encode method no longer throws.
  Source-Link: googleapis/googleapis@5e0dcb2

feat(utils): update encode to support unicode
  PiperOrigin-RevId: 345559182
  Source-Link: googleapis/googleapis@e5eef86

The above commit message will contain:

1. an entry for the "adds v4 UUID to crypto" feature.
2. an entry for the fix "unicode no longer throws exception", along with a note that it's a breaking change.
3. an entry for the feature "update encode to support unicode".

⚠️ Important: The additional messages must be added to the bottom of the commit.

When a commit to the main branch has Release-As: x.x.x (case insensitive) in the commit body, Release Please will open a new pull request for the specified version.

Empty commit example:

git commit --allow-empty -m "chore: release 2.0.0" -m "Release-As: 2.0.0" results in the following commit message:

chore: release 2.0.0

Release-As: 2.0.0

If you have merged a pull request and would like to amend the commit message used to generate the release notes for that commit, you can edit the body of the merged pull requests and add a section like:

BEGIN_COMMIT_OVERRIDE
feat: add ability to override merged commit message

fix: another message
chore: a third message
END_COMMIT_OVERRIDE

The next time Release Please runs, it will use that override section as the commit message instead of the merged commit message.

Release Please creates a release pull request after it notices the default branch contains "releasable units" since the last release. A releasable unit is a commit to the branch with one of the following prefixes: "feat", "fix", and "deps". (A "chore" or "build" commit is not a releasable unit.)

Some languages have their specific releasable unit configuration. For example, "docs" is a prefix for releasable units in Java and Python.

If you think Release Please missed creating a release PR after a pull request with a releasable unit has been merged, please re-run release-please. If you are using the GitHub application, add release-please:force-run label to the merged pull request. If you are using the action, look for the failed invocation and retry the workflow run. Release Please will process the pull request immediately to find releasable units.

Release Please automates releases for the following flavors of repositories:

There are a variety of ways you can deploy release-please:

The easiest way to run Release Please is as a GitHub action. Please see google-github-actions/release-please-action for installation and configuration instructions.

Please see Running release-please CLI for all the configuration options.

There is a probot application available, which allows you to deploy Release Please as a GitHub App. Please see github.com/googleapis/repo-automation-bots for installation and configuration instructions.

Release Please looks at commits since your last release tag. It may or may not be able to find your previous releases. The easiest way to onboard your repository is to bootstrap a manifest config.

Release Please provides several configuration options to allow customizing your release process. Please see customizing.md for more details.

Release Please also supports releasing multiple artifacts from the same repository. See more at manifest-releaser.md.

Our client libraries follow the Node.js release schedule. Libraries are compatible with all current active and maintenance versions of Node.js.

Client libraries targeting some end-of-life versions of Node.js are available, and can be installed via npm dist-tags. The dist-tags follow the naming convention legacy-(version).

Legacy Node.js versions are supported as a best effort:

• Legacy versions will not be tested in continuous integration.
• Some security patches may not be able to be backported.
• Dependencies will not be kept up-to-date, and features will not be backported.

• legacy-8: install client libraries from this dist-tag for versions compatible with Node.js 8.

This library follows Semantic Versioning.

Contributions welcome! See the Contributing Guide.

For more information on the design of the library, see design.

Apache Version 2.0

See LICENSE