github-release-party

Automatically create GitHub releases when you deploy.

I use this gem to automatically create GitHub releases when I deploy. Creating releases helps your users/coworkers/boss to keep up with what's new.

The gem includes rake tasks to deploy to Fly and Heroku. Please submit any improvements as issues.

Example result:

• Release page: https://github.com/stefansundin/rssbox/releases
• RSS Feed: https://github.com/stefansundin/rssbox/releases.atom

Installation

Setup

You need to provide a GitHub access token so that the gem can create the GitHub release after the deployment has finished. There are two different kinds of GitHub access tokens:

• The recommended token is a fine-grained token. Add only the repositories required and grant Read and write access to "Contents" only.
• You can also create a classic token. Limit the scope to repo.

Keep your token secure! Don't commit it to a public repo!

You need to set the environment variable GITHUB_RELEASE_TOKEN with the token as the value. A good place to do this is in your .bash_profile:

export GITHUB_RELEASE_TOKEN=token12345

App

Add the gem to your Gemfile:

group :development do
  gem "github-release-party", require: false
end

This gem is cryptographically signed, you can verify the installation with:

gem cert --add <(curl -Ls https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stefansundin/github-release-party/main/certs/stefansundin.pem)
gem install github-release-party -P MediumSecurity

Require the fly task in your Rakefile:

environment = ENV["APP_ENV"] || ENV["RACK_ENV"] || "development"
if environment == "development"
  require "github-release-party/tasks/fly"
end

Then deploy with:

rake deploy

You also get rake deploy:force, rake deploy:tag, and rake deploy:retag.

When deploying, a tag fly/vXXX (where XXX is the Fly version number) will be created, and then a GitHub release will be created for it.

rake deploy:tag can be run if you deployed to fly manually.

If this gem updates the message format it uses for the releases, you can run rake deploy:retag to update the text in the tags and releases.

Heroku

Note: I no longer use Heroku so there are no guarantees that this will continue to work.

Require the heroku task in your Rakefile:

environment = ENV["APP_ENV"] || ENV["RACK_ENV"] || "development"
if environment == "development"
  require "github-release-party/tasks/heroku"
end

In normal use, the Heroku toolbelt is not required. The release number is read from the git push output. Your Heroku remote must be named heroku.