Create GitHub release and git tag with custom publishing

[mholta]

Problem

We are using changesets/action@v1 for versioning and publishing of a non-npm application (one "root" application, no packages). In our workflow we have implemented custom publishing as referred to (https://github.com/changesets/action#custom-publishing). This works as expected, apart from GitHub releases and git tags not being created. In a (separate) monorepo publishing to NPM, this is working as expected.

According to https://github.com/changesets/changesets/blob/main/docs/versioning-apps.md, it seems like this should be possible.

We have tested that it works with changeset/cli.

As far as I can tell, after some investigation, createRelease is not called if publish: is not specified in the workflow.

Current workaround

After looking into the runPublish method, we found that putting publish: yarn dummy-publish in the workflow and "dummy-release": "echo \"New tag:" && exit 0" under scripts in package.json. This satisfies the condition.

action/src/run.ts

Lines 133 to 138 in 595655c

	let newTagRegex = /New tag:/;
	for (let line of changesetPublishOutput.stdout.split("\n")) {
	let match = line.match(newTagRegex);
	if (match) {

[Andarist]

After looking into the runPublish method, we found that putting publish: yarn dummy-publish in the workflow and "dummy-release": "echo "New tag:" && exit 0" under scripts in package.json. This satisfies the condition.

This is basically what I was also doing. I think that nowadays you should be able to make private packages taggable and that should automatically resolve the issue - I agree that it's not exactly obvious but perhaps it's just a documentation issue. This requirement is vaguely mentioned here

[mholta]

I see! So having a "dummy" publish script that satisfies the /New tag:/ regex is the best solution for now? Would it be worth mentioning in versioning-apps.md? It took quite some time before I realised why this PR didn't fix it.

Note: Changesets only versions NPM package.json files, you can trigger releases for other package formats by creating workflows which trigger on tags/releases being created by changesets.

[Andarist]

I see! So having a "dummy" publish script that satisfies the /New tag:/ regex is the best solution for now?

I'm not 100% sure but I think that with this privatePackages: { version: true, tag: true } your private package should get tagged and that in turn should output this New tag: into the stdout and thus the changesets/action should create a GitHub release for this. The main q is - how exactly you will kick off the actual publication of whatever you are publishing there? I usually do smth like "release": "changeset publish && node ./handle-custom-publishing.js"

Would it be worth mentioning in versioning-apps.md? It took quite some time before I realised why changesets/changesets#662 didn't fix it.

I'm definitely open for docs PRs 😉

[mholta]

After some investigation and testing we found that including changeset tag in the action release script suffice. Ref PR #271

[mholta]

Have you veen able to look into the PR @Andarist? I'll be more than happy to make changes or discuss the implementation.