Automated Version Management and Release

The Elegant project follows a “release early, release often” software development philosophy. By employing this philosophy, we are able to have each team member working on a different aspect of the project with next to no friction from each other’s changes. At any point, any team member can pull changes that have been made in another branch to their fork of the repository and exercise their changes with complete confidence.

Release process should be fully automated to materialize this goal.

Release Versions

Version management and publishing is accomplished using the semantic-release tool and it’s configuration file. This tool entirely removes human intervention from deciding the type and label of the next release of the project.

How Does Versioning Work?

Semantic release bases it’s decisions on the Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 specification, which is very specific.

A quick summary is as follows. Each version is detailed in the form: MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH. The PATCH version is incremented when only backwards compatible bug fixes are made in the release. The MINOR version is incremented (and PATCH reset to 0) when functionality is added in a backwards compatible manner to the release, along with any backwards compatible bug fixes. The MAJOR version is incremented (and MINOR and PATCH reset to 0) when incompatible API changes are introduced, along with any backwards compatible features or fixes.

Here are some examples of release types that are generated based on commit messages:

Note that the release type is specified as if that commit was the only commit in the release. If the first two commits were put together in the release, the Minor Feature Release of the second commit would take precedence over the Patch Release of the first commit. In the same manner, the Major Breaking Release of the third commit would take precedence if all three commits were submitted in the same release.

CHANGELOG File Updates

An integral part of the release is updating the CHANGELOG. By mandating that any commits for the project follow a mandated format for the commit messages, the commits being added to the release can have their commit messages scanned by a tool, including relevant portions into the release notes. This too is done automatically.

Example of an Automated Release

Here is an example of an automated release. This is the Version 3.2.0 that was released on 30-Jul-2019. The specifics about the release can be obtained by clicking on the 7 digit hexadecimal number below the version tag on the left side of the page, which will take you to the release commit.

This release can also be viewed by performing a git log --grep=chore(release) command and looking for the specific release information in the logs. You can then view the specific information for that commit by using the git show command with the hash for the release’s commit, git show 48f39643edd6c3b7449af5dae8ade6323bc7c21f.

Using either process, the result will look like:

commit 48f39643edd6c3b7449af5dae8ade6323bc7c21f
Author: semantic-release-bot <semantic-release-bot@martynus.net>
Date:   Tue Jul 30 19:56:10 2019 +0000

    chore(release): 3.2.0 [skip ci]

    # [3.2.0](https://github.com/Pelican-Elegant/elegant/compare/V3.1.0...V3.2.0) (2019-07-30)

    ### Bug Fixes

    * **freelists:** open FreeLists subscription form in a new tab ([f81657c](https://github.com/Pelican-Elegant/elegant/commit/f81657c))
    * **freelists:** replace deprecated subscription form with button ([9bfe3c1](https://github.com/Pelican-Elegant/elegant/commit/9bfe3c1)), closes [#412](https://github.com/Pelican-Elegant/elegant/issues/412)
    * **freelists:** rm unused include ([27f0831](https://github.com/Pelican-Elegant/elegant/commit/27f0831))

    ### Features

    * **comments:** reduce transition duration from 500 to 200 ([b86e13d](https://github.com/Pelican-Elegant/elegant/commit/b86e13d))
    * **favicon:** add 180x180 dimension shortcut icon support ([dd2ed24](https://github.com/Pelican-Elegant/elegant/commit/dd2ed24))
    * **filter:** add black list, white list feature for Disqus ([4887aec](https://github.com/Pelican-Elegant/elegant/commit/4887aec))
    * **filter:** add black list, white list feature for FreeLists ([2407cc8](https://github.com/Pelican-Elegant/elegant/commit/2407cc8))
    * **filter:** add black list, white list feature for Mailchimp ([b96122d](https://github.com/Pelican-Elegant/elegant/commit/b96122d))

In the main body of the output, there are links with associated text which are 7 digit hexadecimal numbers. Each of these links is to a specific commit that was part of the release. If you follow the link, you can verify that the correct text is being used for the release notes.

Additionally, there are links that are associated with text that starts with the # character followed by an integer. Each of these links is to an issue that was either updated or fixed by the given commit. As with the above paragraph, you can verify that the correct issue was associated with the commit in the release notes by following the commit links and looking for any issue number at the end of the commit text.

As the commits added in to this release included features, the Minor Feature Release release type was used, incrementing the minor part of the version number from 3.1.0 to 3.2.0.

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