Automate version management

go-semrel-gitlab is a set of commands you can use to compose your automated release workflow.

• it’s designed to run in GitLab CI pipeline
• it’s available as a docker image or a single binary, so it’s easy to include in your pipeline

The executable name is release, and it can

• determine the next semantic version using the previous version and commit messages
• create/update changelog
• create tags with release notes
• attach files to release notes
• commit version bumps (eg. package.json, pom.xml, CHANGELOG.md …)

Other features include.

• customizable commit message types
• easy transitioning from initial development
• pre-releases (experimental)

This project was inspired by semantic-release. You should read it’s excellent documentation to learn about the principles and benefits of release automation. Pay special attention to commit message format. go-semrel-gitlab depends on that, too. Also check out Conventional Commits specification which is a more recent description of the same pattern.

Comparison to semantic-release

The key difference of go-semrel-gitlab and semantic-release is that they approach the problem from different angles:

• semantic-release has a pre-defined, configurable workflow which was originally designed for publishing npm packages from Github, but now there are plugins for GitLab, DockerHub, and more.
• go-semrel-gitlab leaves workflow coordination to Gitlab CI, provides few (hopefully simple) commands to automate the versioning and gitlab related tasks of a release, and tries to minimize the constraints it imposes to the pipeline configuration.