Feature: allow for (configurable) label to be added to release PRs

[michaelfaith]

Release Please will label release PRs with a specific set of labels depending on the state of the PR. e.g. autorelease: pending for release PRs that haven't merged yet. Having a consistent label for changeset PRs that we can use for other automations, like we had with Release Please, would be nice to have. It would be even better if this label could be configurable by an input option!

[Andarist]

It feels to me this can be achieved with ease in userland:

- name: Create or update version PR
  id: changesets
  uses: changesets/action@v1
  env:
    GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

- name: Label version PR
  if: steps.changesets.outputs.pr-number != ''
  env:
    GH_TOKEN: ${{ github.token }}
  run: |
    gh pr edit "${{ steps.changesets.outputs.pr-number }}" \
      --add-label "autorelease: pending"

Note that the gh CLI is already available in the GitHub Action runners, you don't have to install it yourself.

[michaelfaith]

I guess so. I just thought it would be nice to have the feature baked in, like several other popular actions have, rather than everyone that wants it having to roll their own.

Examples of other actions that have a configurable labeling feature built-in:

• Release Please: https://github.com/googleapis/release-please/blob/main/docs/customizing.md#release-lifecycle-labels
• actions/stale: https://github.com/actions/stale
• peakoss/anti-slop: https://github.com/peakoss/anti-slop

Totally understand if you don't agree with the feature request, but wanted to throw it out there as something nice to have.

[Andarist]

actions/stale and peakoss/anti-slop have a totally different purpose so the context is different.

Release Please has some lifecycle of its own and manages that label. I would have to study more how it works to really assess how it compares to Changesets.

We could support a "static" pr-label input, I just don't understand what exactly that would allow. Like, automations can already target all PRs created for specific branches, we use a stable branch pattern for that purpose.

I'm not saying no to this feature request. I would just have to learn more about your needs and how popular of a feature request this becomes before comitting to this.

[michaelfaith]

I would just have to learn more about your needs and how popular of a feature request this becomes before comitting to this.

For sure. The immediate use case that motivated this request, was to have a better way to exempt the PRs created by Changesets from the anti-slop workflow. There are several options for exempting PRs, and we ended up going with exempting the bot user that we have set up to run the changeset action and create the PRs, but we'd like to use a static label as that exempting mechanism instead. That way, if we change the bot, or changesets changes the branch name pattern, etc, it all still works, because we control the label. So, that's the immediate use case, but I expect there'll be more benefits that we'd see out of it, as we become more active and mature / evolve our processes.

We could support a "static" pr-label input,

This would be great 👍