@rossmcewan/semantic-release-nx

Apply semantic-release's automatic publishing to an Nx monorepo.

Why

The default configuration of semantic-release assumes a one-to-one relationship between a GitHub repository and an npm package.

This library allows using semantic-release with a single GitHub repository containing many npm packages.

How

Instead of attributing all commits to a single package, commits are assigned to packages based on the files that a commit touched.

If a commit touched a file in or below a package's root, it will be considered for that package's next release. A single commit can belong to multiple packages and may trigger the release of multiple packages.

Additionally, if a commit touches a file of a package that is a dependency of the current package, then the commit will also be included.

In order to avoid version collisions, generated git tags are namespaced using the given package's name: <package-name>-<version>.

Install

Both semantic-release and @rossmcewan/semantic-release-nx must be accessible in each monorepo package.

npm install -D semantic-release @rossmcewan/semantic-release-nx

Usage

Run semantic-release in an individual monorepo package and apply @rossmcewan/semantic-release-nx via the extends option.

On the command line:

$ npm run semantic-release -e @rossmcewan/semantic-release-nx

Or in the release config:

{
  "extends": "@rossmcewan/semantic-release-nx"
}

NOTE: This library CAN'T be applied via the plugins option.

{
  "plugins": [
    "@rossmcewan/semantic-release-nx" // This WON'T work
  ]
}

With Yarn Workspaces

$ yarn workspaces run semantic-release -e @rossmcewan/semantic-release-nx

With pnpm

pnpm has built-in workspace functionality for monorepos. Similarly to the above, you can use pnpm to make release in all packages:

pnpm -r --workspace-concurrency=1 exec -- npx --no-install semantic-release -e @rossmcewan/semantic-release-nx

Thanks to how npx's package resolution works, if the repository root is in $PATH (typically true on CI), semantic-release and @rossmcewan/semantic-release-nx can be installed once in the repo root instead of in each individual package, likely saving both time and disk space.

Advanced

This library modifies the context object passed to semantic-release plugins in the following way to make them compatible with a monorepo.

Step	Description
analyzeCommits	Filters context.commits to only include the given monorepo package's commits and any commmits that affects packages the current package depends on.
generateNotes	Filters context.commits to only include the given monorepo package's commits. Modifies context.nextRelease.version to use the monorepo git tag format. The wrapped (default) generateNotes implementation uses this variable as the header for the release notes. Since all release notes end up in the same Github repository, using just the version as a header introduces ambiguity.

tagFormat

Pre-configures the tagFormat option to use the monorepo git tag format.