This project is a Github Action that allows maintainers of open-source projects that follow SemVer to automate the automation of releases.

To use this automation in your own repository, copy the example/.github workflows into your own project:

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/laminas/automatic-releases.git
cd /path/to/your/project
cp -r /tmp/automatic-releases/examples/.github ./.github
git add .github
git commit -m "Added release automation"

Then add following secrets to your project or organisation:

• GIT_AUTHOR_NAME - full name of the author of your releases: can be the name of a bot account.
• GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL - email address of the author of your releases: can be an email address of a bot account.
• SIGNING_SECRET_KEY - a password-less private GPG key in ASCII format, to be used for signing your releases: please use a dedicated GPG subkey for this purpose. Unsigned releases are not supported, and won't be supported.
• ORGANIZATION_ADMIN_TOKEN - if you use the file from examples/.github/workflows/release-on-milestone-closed.yml, then you have to provide a ORGANIZATION_ADMIN_TOKEN, which is a github token with administrative rights over your organisation (issued by a user that has administrative rights over your project). This is required for the laminas:automatic-releases:switch-default-branch-to-next-minor command, because changing default branch of a repository currently requires administrative token rights. You can generate a token from your personal access tokens page.

Assuming your project has Github Actions enabled, each time you close a milestone, this action will perform all following steps (or stop with an error):

1. determine if all issues and pull requests associated with this milestone are closed
2. determine if the milestone is named with the SemVer x.y.z format
3. create a changelog by looking at the milestone description and associated issues and pull requests
4. select a branch for the release:
   • if a branch matching x.y.z exists, it will be selected
   • otherwise, master will be used
5. create a tag named x.y.z on the selected branch, with the generated changelog
6. publish a release named x.y.z, with the generated tag and changelog
7. create (if applicable), a pull request from the selected branch to the next release branch
8. create (if necessary) a "next minor" release branch x.y+1.z
9. switch default repository branch to newest release branch

Please read the feature/ specification for more detailed scenarios on how the tool is supposed to operate.