Call @actions/core setOutput with created tag

[JasonEtco]

👋 @bcoe! Following up on this Twitter conversation. It'd be rad if this action called @actions/core's setOutput method, to use the tag that was created in the next actions in a workflow. I'm not sure where that's exposed, but if you can point me to it, happy to open a PR. It'd look something like this:

const release = ReleasePRFactory.build(...)
await release.run()

// Assuming it's exposed on `ReleasePRFactory.tag_name`:
core.setOutput('tag_name', release.tag_name)

This would pair nicely with build-and-tag-action's tag_name input!

[bcoe]

@JasonEtco I don't think it does so yet, but we could make this line:

https://github.com/bcoe/release-please-action/blob/master/index.js#L20

Return the tag of a release, if one is created?

[JasonEtco]

Nice, thanks for that @bcoe. I think this would also require an upstream change to googleapis/release-please, specifically here:

https://github.com/googleapis/release-please/blob/42e5bc6b8654afd4ce41e4c81333e1cf3bce75a5/src/github-release.ts#L81-L86

GitHubRelease#createRelease doesn't return or otherwise expose the generated release, or the tag (ex: we could get it from the release PR over here). I can open those two PRs (one there, one here) if you'd like! They'd be pretty simple:

class GitHubRelease {
  async createRelease() {
    // ...
-      await this.gh.createRelease(
+      const release = await this.gh.createRelease(
        this.packageName,
        gitHubReleasePR.version,
        gitHubReleasePR.sha,
        latestReleaseNotes
      );
   // ...
+  return release
}

- await gr.createRelease()
+ const release = await gr.createRelease()
+ core.setOutput('tag_name', release.tag_name)

[bcoe]

@JasonEtco bumped into a couple issues and had to rollback:

1. unfortunately need all the contents of the dist/ folder.
2. release please currently looks at the sha of the last tag released to determine what commits have landed since the last release, since build-and-tag-actions forces a new sha this causes issues with the algorithm (I'm looking at changing this behavior to instead use the sha of the release that was last merged).