Awesome

Usage

You can use the Release Drafter GitHub Action in a GitHub Actions Workflow by configuring a YAML-based workflow file, e.g. .github/workflows/release-drafter.yml, with the following:

name: Release Drafter

on:
  push:
    # branches to consider in the event; optional, defaults to all
    branches:
      - master
  # pull_request event is required only for autolabeler
  pull_request:
    # Only following types are handled by the action, but one can default to all as well
    types: [opened, reopened, synchronize]
  # pull_request_target event is required for autolabeler to support PRs from forks
  # pull_request_target:
  #   types: [opened, reopened, synchronize]

permissions:
  contents: read

jobs:
  update_release_draft:
    permissions:
      # write permission is required to create a github release
      contents: write
      # write permission is required for autolabeler
      # otherwise, read permission is required at least
      pull-requests: write
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # (Optional) GitHub Enterprise requires GHE_HOST variable set
      #- name: Set GHE_HOST
      #  run: |
      #    echo "GHE_HOST=${GITHUB_SERVER_URL##https:\/\/}" >> $GITHUB_ENV

      # Drafts your next Release notes as Pull Requests are merged into "master"
      - uses: release-drafter/release-drafter@v6
        # (Optional) specify config name to use, relative to .github/. Default: release-drafter.yml
        # with:
        #   config-name: my-config.yml
        #   disable-autolabeler: true
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

If you're unable to use GitHub Actions, you can use the Release Drafter GitHub App. Please refer to the Release Drafter GitHub App documentation for more information.

Configuration

Once you’ve added Release Drafter to your repository, it must be enabled by adding a .github/release-drafter.yml configuration file to each repository. The configuration file must reside in your default branch, no other configurations will be accepted.

Example

For example, take the following .github/release-drafter.yml file in a repository:

template: |
  ## What’s Changed

  $CHANGES

As pull requests are merged, a draft release is kept up-to-date listing the changes, ready to publish when you’re ready:

The following is a more complicated configuration, which categorises the changes into headings, and automatically suggests the next version number:

name-template: 'v$RESOLVED_VERSION 🌈'
tag-template: 'v$RESOLVED_VERSION'
categories:
  - title: '🚀 Features'
    labels:
      - 'feature'
      - 'enhancement'
  - title: '🐛 Bug Fixes'
    labels:
      - 'fix'
      - 'bugfix'
      - 'bug'
  - title: '🧰 Maintenance'
    label: 'chore'
change-template: '- $TITLE @$AUTHOR (#$NUMBER)'
change-title-escapes: '\<*_&' # You can add # and @ to disable mentions, and add ` to disable code blocks.
version-resolver:
  major:
    labels:
      - 'major'
  minor:
    labels:
      - 'minor'
  patch:
    labels:
      - 'patch'
  default: patch
template: |
  ## Changes

  $CHANGES

Configuration Options

You can configure Release Drafter using the following key in your .github/release-drafter.yml file:

Release Drafter also supports Probot Config, if you want to store your configuration files in a central repository. This allows you to share configurations between projects, and create a organization-wide configuration file by creating a repository named .github with the file .github/release-drafter.yml.

Template Variables

You can use any of the following variables in your template, header and footer:

Category Template Variables

You can use any of the following variables in category-template:

Next Version Variables

You can use any of the following variables in your template, header, footer, name-template and tag-template:

Version Template Variables

You can use any of the following variables in version-template to format the $NEXT_{PATCH,MINOR,MAJOR}_VERSION variables:

Version Resolver

With the version-resolver option version number incrementing can be resolved automatically based on labels of individual pull requests. Append the following to your .github/release-drafter.yml file:

version-resolver:
  major:
    labels:
      - 'major'
  minor:
    labels:
      - 'minor'
  patch:
    labels:
      - 'patch'
  default: patch

The above config controls the output of the $RESOLVED_VERSION variable.

If a pull requests is found with the label major/minor/patch, the corresponding version key will be incremented from a semantic version. The maximum out of major, minor and patch found in any of the pull requests will be used to increment the version number. If no pull requests are found with the assigned labels, the default will be assigned.

Change Template Variables

You can use any of the following variables in change-template:

References

Note: This is only revelant for GitHub app users as references is ignored when running as GitHub action due to GitHub workflows more powerful on conditions

References takes an list and accepts strings and regex. If none are specified, we default to the repository’s default branch usually master.

references:
  - master
  - v.+

Currently matching against any ref/heads/ and ref/tags/ references behind the scene

Categorize Pull Requests

With the categories option you can categorize pull requests in release notes using labels. For example, append the following to your .github/release-drafter.yml file:

categories:
  - title: '🚀 Features'
    label: 'feature'
  - title: '🐛 Bug Fixes'
    labels:
      - 'fix'
      - 'bugfix'
      - 'bug'

Pull requests with the label "feature" or "fix" will now be grouped together:

Adding such labels to your PRs can be automated by using the embedded Autolabeler functionality (see below), PR Labeler or Probot Auto Labeler.

Optionally you can add a collapse-after entry to your category item, if the category has more than the defined collapse-after pull requests then it will show all pull requests collapsed for that category. Append the collapse-after integer to your category as following:

categories:
  - title: '⬆️ Dependencies'
    collapse-after: 3
    labels:
      - 'dependencies'

Exclude Pull Requests

With the exclude-labels option you can exclude pull requests from the release notes using labels. For example, append the following to your .github/release-drafter.yml file:

exclude-labels:
  - 'skip-changelog'

Pull requests with the label "skip-changelog" will now be excluded from the release draft.

Include Pull Requests

With the include-labels option you can specify pull requests from the release notes using labels. Only pull requests that have the configured labels will be included in the pull request. For example, append the following to your .github/release-drafter.yml file:

include-labels:
  - 'app-foo'

Pull requests with the label "app-foo" will be the only pull requests included in the release draft.

Exclude Contributors

By default, the $CONTRIBUTORS variable will contain the names or usernames of all the contributors of a release. The exclude-contributors option allows you to remove certain usernames from that list. This can be useful if don't wish to include yourself, to better highlight only the third-party contributions.

exclude-contributors:
  - 'myusername'

Replacers

You can search and replace content in the generated changelog body, using regular expressions, with the replacers option. Each replacer is applied in order.

replacers:
  - search: '/CVE-(\d{4})-(\d+)/g'
    replace: 'https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-$1-$2'
  - search: 'myname'
    replace: 'My Name'

Autolabeler

You can add automatically a label into a pull request, with the autolabeler option. Available matchers are files (glob), branch (regex), title (regex) and body (regex). Matchers are evaluated independently; the label will be set if at least one of the matchers meets the criteria.

autolabeler:
  - label: 'chore'
    files:
      - '*.md'
    branch:
      - '/docs{0,1}\/.+/'
  - label: 'bug'
    branch:
      - '/fix\/.+/'
    title:
      - '/fix/i'
  - label: 'enhancement'
    branch:
      - '/feature\/.+/'
    body:
      - '/JIRA-[0-9]{1,4}/'

Prerelease increment

When creating prerelease (prerelease: true), you can add a prerelease identifier to increment the prerelease version number, with the prerelease-identifier option. It accept any string, but it's recommended to use Semantic Versioning prerelease identifiers (alpha, beta, rc, etc).

Using prerelease-identifier automatically enable include-prereleases.

prerelease-identifier: 'alpha' # will create a prerelease with version number x.x.x-alpha.x

Projects that don't use Semantic Versioning

If your project doesn't follow Semantic Versioning you can still use Release Drafter, but you may want to set the version-template option to customize how the $NEXT_{PATCH,MINOR,MAJOR}_VERSION environment variables are generated.

For example, if your project doesn't use patch version numbers, you can set version-template to $MAJOR.$MINOR. If the current release is version 1.0, then $NEXT_MINOR_VERSION will be 1.1.

Action Inputs

The Release Drafter GitHub Action accepts a number of optional inputs directly in your workflow configuration. These will typically override default behavior specified in your release-drafter.yml config.

Action Outputs

The Release Drafter GitHub Action sets a couple of outputs which can be used as inputs to other Actions in the workflow (example).

Developing

If you have Node v10+ installed locally, you can run the tests, and a local app, using the following commands:

# Install dependencies
yarn install

# Run the tests
yarn test

# Run the app locally
yarn test:watch

Once you've started the app, visit localhost:3000 and you'll get step-by-step instructions for installing it in your GitHub account so you can start pushing commits and testing it locally.

If you don’t have Node installed, you can use Docker Compose:

# Run the tests
docker compose run --rm app

Contributing

Third-party contributions are welcome! 🙏🏼 See CONTRIBUTING.md for step-by-step instructions.

If you need help or have a question, let me know via a GitHub issue.

Deployment

If you want to deploy your own copy of Release Drafter, follow the Probot Deployment Guide.

Releasing

Run the following command:

git checkout master && git pull && npm version [major | minor | patch]

The command does the following:

• Ensures you’re on master and don’t have local, un-commited changes
• Bumps the version number in package.json based on major, minor or patch
• Runs the postversion npm script in package.json, which:
  • Runs test
  • Pushes the tag to GitHub, which triggers GitHub Action that does the following:
    • Releases NPM
    • Publish the Release Draft!