Use the "cutarelease.py" script in this repo to make to make cutting a release of your project a single step.

Basically, it will help cut a release for a git-based project that follows a few conventions. It'll update your changelog (CHANGES.md), add a git tag, push those changes, optionally npm publish (for projects with a "package.json"), optionally upload to pypi (for Python projects with a setup.py), update your version to the next patch level release, and insert changelog boilerplate for the new version.

First, this script isn't useful unless you follow these conventions for your projects:

Project Conventions

I use git for version control.

I use 'X.Y.Z' (aka major.minor.patch) versioning for all my projects. Increment the patch number for a bug fix. Increment the minor version for a change that adds functionality but doesn't break backward compatibility (or if you know for damn certain that your compat-change isn't going to break anyone). Increment the major version for major architectural changes and/or backward compatibility breakages.

I write a CHANGES.md change log file for my projects (example: json changelog). This is a manually edited file with a section for released and in-progress "interesting to the user" changes to the project. Yes, there is the commit history but that is often obtuse to the end user and hard to correlate to released versions. Basically you want to answer this user question: "I have version N, what will it mean for me to upgrade to version M."

I tag my repo for each release using the version number as the tag name.

The commited version number at the HEAD of the repo is for the next unreleased version. So, for example, if "1.2.3" is the latest released version, then the version at the repo HEAD is "1.2.4".

State of this Project

I've just quickly put this into its own github repo. Likely this has some hiccups for general usage (i.e. is tailored to my specific usage). At least four projects and two people are using this though :), so it isn't totally busted.

I'm a Python and Node.js guy, so this script will probably need some love to be nice for Ruby, Perl, etc. projects.

Installation

Pick one of the following options:

1. "cutarelease.py" has no external deps (other than a fairly recent Python 2.x). You can just copy it over to your repo's tools directory.

2. npm install cutarelease. Perhaps a little evil to do this for a Python script. Sue me.

3. Git submodules. So something like:

   mkdir -p deps
   git submodule add https://github.com/trentm/cutarelease.git deps/cutarelease
   git submodule update --init deps/cutarelease
   

   then use "deps/cutarelease/cutarelease.py" in your Makefile.

Usage

I tend to add a "make cutarelease" target. For example, in my json project I have something like this:

cutarelease:
    python tools/cutarelease.py -f package.json -f lib/jsontool.js

A typical patch fix goes like this (example: json issue #23):

• Commit a fix for the issue (commit). This includes an update to the changelog.
• Comment on and close the issue (comment).
• Run make cutarelease (which did these two commits and tags after the first of those)
• Optionally make a release announcement if significant enough: blog, twitter, mailing list, whatever. (E.g. tweet for json 2.0.3).

License

MIT. See LICENSE.txt.