Continuous Integration environments

October 3, 2023 ยท View on GitHub

As release-it is increasingly used from CI/CD environments such as Travis, Circle CI or GitHub Actions, this page outlines some popular ways to configure this. Do you have additional successful integrations, or experiencing issues with the existing ones below, feel free to open a ticket.

Contents

Git

In order to push the release commit and tag back to the remote, the CI/CD environment should be authenticated with the original host (e.g. GitHub). Also see Git.

When using an SSH url (such as git@github.com:user/repo.git), add the public key to the CI/CD environment.

HTTPS

When using an HTTPS url (such as https://github.com/user/project.git), things are slightly more complicated. For GitHub, add the GITHUB_TOKEN token to the CI/CD environment. Then make sure to add this token as a password in the origin url before running release-it. An example is this .travis.yml section:

script:
  - git remote rm origin
  - git remote add origin https://[user]:${GITHUB_TOKEN}@github.com/[user]/[project].git
  - git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/main

Replace [user] and [project] with the actual values.

GitHub Actions

To run release-it from a GitHub Action, here's an example job (fragment) to configure a Git user (to push the release commit), and expose NPM_TOKEN for publishing to the npm registry and GITHUB_TOKEN for the GitHub Release:

jobs:
  release:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - name: git config
        run: |
          git config user.name "${GITHUB_ACTOR}"
          git config user.email "${GITHUB_ACTOR}@users.noreply.github.com"
      - run: npm install
      - run: npm run release
        env:
          NPM_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.NPM_TOKEN }}
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

The fetch-depth: 0 option is only necessary when the Git history is required e.g. if using a plugin such as @release-it/conventional-changelog.

If you enjoy watching a video, David from Kodaps created a great walk-through including setting up npm and GitHub tokens: How to use GitHub Actions & Release-It to Easily Release Your Code

npm

To publish a package to the (or any) npm registry from within a CI or CD environment such as Travis or Circle, make the NPM_TOKEN available in the .npmrc file. This file should look like this before release-it attempts to publish the package:

//registry.npmjs.org/:_authToken=$NPM_TOKEN

One way to achieve this is to set the NPM_TOKEN in the CI environment, and from a script do:

npm config set //registry.npmjs.org/:_authToken $NPM_TOKEN

This will create/update the .npmrc file and add the token there. Ideally you should either .gitignore this file, otherwise you might end up committing it to your repo if you are using release-it's git options.

Since release-it executes npm whoami as a prerequisite check, which does not seem to respect the .npmrc file, the --npm.skipChecks argument can be used.

Travis

Here's an example fragment of what to add to .travis.yml:

deploy:
  script:
    - echo "//registry.npmjs.org/:_authToken=$NPM_TOKEN" > .npmrc
    - npm run release

Circle

In short, here's the relevant fragment from .circleci/config.yml:

jobs:
  deploy:
    steps:
      - attach_workspace:
          at: ~/repo
      - run:
          name: Authenticate with registry
          command: npm config set //registry.npmjs.org/:_authToken $NPM_TOKEN

During the release process, your project's package.json will be updated to bump the version. You will need to setup CircleCI with a non read-only SSH key pair from your Github account if you want it to be able to push that change back to the repo.

See Publishing npm Packages Using CircleCI for more details.

GitHub & GitLab Releases

Make sure the GITHUB_TOKEN or GITLAB_TOKEN environment variable is set in the CI/CD environment to publish (or draft) GitHub or GitLab releases. This works the same as on your local machine.

GitLab CI

When using release-it with GitLab CI and SSH, make sure the following requirements are met:

  • git and ssh as packages are installed in the job
  • npm install is run beforehand
  • Environment variables contain GITLAB_TOKEN, SSH_PRIVATE_KEY, CI_EMAIL and CI_USER
  • A user with permissions to write to protected branches or deploy key (env var) is added to the repo

Alpine

The following example shows a pipeline that first installs Git and OpenSSH to Alpine, adds the SSH private key to the SSH agent, configures SSH, and eventually executes release-it:

before_script:
  - apk add --no-cache git openssh
  - eval `ssh-agent -s`
  - echo "${SSH_PRIVATE_KEY}" | tr -d '\r' | ssh-add - > /dev/null # add ssh key
  - mkdir -p ~/.ssh
  - chmod 700 ~/.ssh
  - '[[ -f /.dockerenv ]] && echo -e "Host *\n\tStrictHostKeyChecking no\n\n" > ~/.ssh/config'
  - git checkout $CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME
  - git remote set-url origin "git@gitlab.com:$CI_PROJECT_PATH.git"
  - git config --global user.name "${CI_USERNAME}"
  - git config --global user.email "${CI_EMAIL}"
  - npm install
script:
  - npx release-it --ci

Note: the git remote set-url could also be set with the git.pushRepo option in the release-it configuration.

Error: tag already exists

Some people have reported an issue when using GitLab CI (in #573):

ERROR fatal: tag vX.X.X already exists

Here is an example script sequence for GitLab to mitigate the issue:

- git pull origin $CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME
- npm run release

Specifically, make sure to fetch with the --prune-tags argument before release-it tries to create the Git tag:

{
  "hooks": {
    "before:init": "git fetch --prune --prune-tags origin"
  }
}