Improve release process

[jeddy3]

Our release process has served us well over the years, but it has quite a few manual steps. We should revisit it as we're trying to reduce the friction to publishing contributions.

@ntwb suggested:

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There’s quite a few GitHub Actions that can publish to npm, there’s a list here:

https://github.com/marketplace?type=actions&query=Npm+pub

The ones i've looked at work like this:

• Create a branch, e.g release-17-8-0 and the action only fires if the branch name matches a regex
• Once the tests pass, and once the PR is approved and merged, it publishes after merge to npm

Setting this up for the stylelint organisation would greatly simplify the release process for all repos IMHO

A few changes to the workflow would be required, primarily the change log update, but I think that shouldn’t be too tricky to overcome

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There is also PR: #4682, which is of a similar vane.

I'm labelling as "discussion" so that everyone can, if you like, share their ideas and thoughts on how we can make the release process better.

[ybiquitous]

It seems that publishing on CI (GitHub Actions) is now available via automation token:

https://github.blog/changelog/2020-10-02-npm-automation-tokens/

By this feature, I expect we can realize the complete automation of npm publishing!

[jeddy3]

Labelling as "ready to implement" if someone wants to investigate how this might work.

[jeddy3]

Another write-up on using GitHub Actions:
https://snyk.io/blog/github-actions-to-securely-publish-npm-packages/

[hudochenkov]

@jeddy3 did you close this issue on purpose?

[jeddy3]

Oops! Nope, I didn't mean too.

[github-actions]

This issue is older than one month. Please ask before opening a pull request, as it may no longer be relevant.

[JounQin]

The changesets workflow is not used fully for now, for example, auto releasing on CI. I'm not for sure is there anything blocks us from migration.

[Mouvedia]

#7473 was related

[Mouvedia]

There are also actions to create GitHub releases.
e.g. https://github.com/softprops/action-gh-release