How to setup Semantic Release with GitHub Actions.

Recently, My coworker is using Nx to automate his workflow, including automated release using semantic version. I found this method quite useful, so I want to re-implement on single GitHub repositories (without Nx).

First Step: Create GitHub's Personal Access Token

You can follow this link on how to create Personal Access Token.
You can choose Fine-grained tokens as you can scope specific repositories. (Or Token (Classic))

Make sure that you grant repository permission to token. For my configuration I use:

Read Access

• variables
• environments
• metadata (default)
• secrets

Read/Write Access

• code
• commit statuses
• issue
• pull requests
• workflows

I might grant unnecessary permission, so feel free to correct me.

Second Step: Setup GitHub token in repository's environment

1.Go to Settings options

2.Select Environments

3.Create Environment

4.Create Environment Secret

I use GH_TOKEN to represent GITHUB_TOKEN (GitHub not allows naming variables with prefix "GITHUB").

Third Step: Setup workflows

I use this package -> Action for Semantic Release to setup my workflow.
Use this script to create workflow

name: test
on:
  push:
    branches:
      # Change this if your primary branch is not main
      - master
      - dev

jobs:
  main:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    environment:
      name: Semver #your environment name
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          persist-credentials: false
      - name: Semantic Release
        uses: cycjimmy/semantic-release-action@v4
        env:
          GH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GH_TOKEN }}

In this code snippets, it's meant to

• setup environment
• perform semantic release

Fourth Step: Create .releaserc

This will be semantic-release configuration file for

• create release tag
• create change log
• define commit message convention -> conventionalcommits

Create .releaserc in your project.

{
    "branches": [
        "master",
        "dev"
    ],
    "plugins": [
        "@semantic-release/commit-analyzer",
        "@semantic-release/release-notes-generator",
        [
            "@semantic-release/changelog",
            {
                "changelogFile": "CHANGELOG.md"
            }
        ],
        [
            "@semantic-release/git",
            {
                "assets": [
                    "CHANGELOG.md"
                ]
            }
        ],
        "@semantic-release/github"

    ]
}

Final Step: Add, Commit and Push

This step will be the byproduct of your work so far.

Once you commit your code with message convention, for example, feat: add some features, it will trigger the semantic-release. Default convention message with angular preset included:

• fix -> bug fixes: patch release
• feat -> feature: minor release
• breaking change -> break change: major release

Once you push your code it will run GitHub Action and release your project.

Then it will create Release and CHANGELOG.md in the project.

Conclusion

semantic-release can help you automate your versioning and release and really useful tracking and document change.

Feel free to comment or give feedbacks. I'm appreciate your time for reading 😄.

Reference

https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/
https://github.com/marketplace/actions/action-for-semantic-release

Or my sample repository -> https://github.com/Sahanon-P/semver-sample