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Genesis

A while back I had an idea for a small cli I wanted to build. When I finished the code, I started to think about the release process.

Obviously, I needed to create and upload a wheel to PyPI. However, I had 3 additional requirements:

  1. Continuous

    Can't tell you how many times I waited for features just because of a complex release process or an arbitrary release date.

    Not in my house.

    If features/bugfixes are not dependent on each other, there should be no reason for them to wait in the oven.

    I wanted to release a new version each time I finish implementing a certain issue, that is, each time a PR is merged to the main branch. This process had to be completely automated, no human involvement what so ever.

    I think this is the right way to release software, and if you are not in a position to do so, it probably means you're doing something wrong. Obviously this only applies to software that does not require human testing.

  2. Changelog generation

    The release should include the relevant changelog based on Github issues. Each Github issue that makes it to a release, should specify which release was it.

    Also, the release version number should be derived from the issues that were included in the release. Each issue will have a label specifying which semantic version bump it should perform. (e.g an issue labeled with the 'patch' label will cause a patch bump, and so forth)

  3. Binary executable

    Since the tool is supposed to kind of replace the linux sed utility (in a specific use case), I wanted a very easy install method, and an ability to use it on environments that don't even have python installed. This binary file should be uploaded to the Github release as a release asset.

So, how was I supposed to achieve this? Well, there were 3 options:

Honestly, I quickly gave up on this option since I was pretty sure the 'Binary executable' feature does not exist in any of them. Also, I was already using Travis-CI and Appveyor for my tests, and really wanted to avoid having to learn and configure another tool.

I knew I wanted the release process to execute immediately after the tests pass, so I was looking for a small script I can invoke via tox.

  • Use existing open source tools.

I couldn't find any tool to answer all of my requirements. There were however a few tools that might have been somewhat helpful:

pyreleaser github-release semantic-release github-changelog

Though these tools are in the same domain, they weren't enough.

  • Write my own!

When I reached this point, I started to realize that this might be a useful tool not just for my project, but for any Python project hosted on Github. I believe most open source projects on Github use either Travis-CI and/or CircleCI and/or Appveyor to run their tests, so what if they could add a single command line to perform all these release related tasks? pretty cool.