Release Action

This GitHub action handles versioning and releasing to GitHub releases.

What does it do

The action is based around the concept of releasing pull requests that are merged down to the main branch that has one of the following labels adhering to semantic versioning version 2 :

Name	Description
Major	Breaking changes has been implemented in public APIs and/or behavior
Minor	New capabilities has been added
Patch	Bug fixes

If none of these labels are present, it doesn't consider this to be a release and will not produce a GitHub release and returns the property of should-publish with false. This condition is only valid for a closed GitHub event.

In addition it will look at the branch ref the pull request lives in. If the branch name is a semantic version number, it will use this as the basis for a version number and generate a prerelease version number based on the PR number and the sha of the commit:

..-PR..

Similar if the target branch has a name that is a semantic version number, it will use this to form a prerelease version number. The output property isolated-for-pull-request will be set to true.

It will only generate a valid PR pre-release if the pull request is in draft. If the pull request is not in draft the should-publish will be set to false and there will be no version info in the version output.

If any of the branch names happen to be a semantic version number with a prerelease included in it, it will produce a version number based on the full version and just adding the short sha of the commit at the end. In this case the output property isolated-for-pull-request will be set to false.

This behavior can be useful for building artifacts that is linked to a pull request and one wants to test them out before they are actually merged down to the target branch.

The action is running a main stage and a post stage. The main stage runs the following steps.

• Establishes the context by looking at the GitHub context in which the action is running in. Decides if this is a publishable build.
• Increments the version by looking at the latest version tag of the repository and increases according to what the context decided the build type was.

The post stage is only running if successful and runs the following steps:

• Prepends to the CHANGELOG.md file in the repository with the content of the description.
• Releases a snapshot of the source code to GitHub releases with the calculated version number.

Usage

Below is an example of use with a .NET 6 pipeline:

name: Publish

env:
  NUGET_OUTPUT: ./Artifacts/NuGet

on:
  pull_request:
    types: [closed]  

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Setup .Net
        uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v1
        with:
          dotnet-version: '6.0.100-preview.7.21379.14'
      - name: Build .NET
        run: dotnet build --configuration Release

      - name: Release
        id: release
        uses: aksio-system/release-action@v1
        with:
          user-name: 'Aksio Build'
          user-email: 'build@aksio.no'

      - name: Remove any existing artifacts
        run: rm -rf ${{ env.NUGET_OUTPUT }}

      - name: Create NuGet packages
        if: ${{ steps.release.outputs.should-publish == 'true' }}
        run: dotnet pack --no-build --configuration Release -o ${{ env.NUGET_OUTPUT }} -p:PackageVersion=${{ steps.release.outputs.version }} -p:IncludeSymbols=true -p:SymbolPackageFormat=snupkg

      - name: Push NuGet packages
        if: ${{ steps.release.outputs.should-publish == 'true' }}
        run: dotnet nuget push --skip-duplicate '${{ env.NUGET_OUTPUT }}/*.nupkg' --api-key ${{ secrets.NUGET_API_KEY }} --source https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json

Inputs

Property	Description	Default value	Required
path	Relative path in repository to the changelog.	CHANGELOG.md	-
user-name	UserName to use for any Git actions, such as commit of the changelog		X
user-email	Email to associate with the UserName for any Git actions, such as commit of the changelog		X
github-token	The GitHub token to use for any GitHub actions	${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}	-
version	Version number to use when creating the release. If there is a value and the value is not an empty string, it will override the logic of deducting the version number based on tags on the PR.
release-notes	Release notes to use when creating the release.

Outputs

Property	Description
should-publish	Boolean telling whether or not a publish should be done
version	Version number to publish with
prerelease	Boolean telling whether or not a it is a prerelease
isolated-for-pull-request	Boolean telling whether or not it should be an isolated release for the pull request only