Release Creation

Tag-driven release pipeline

The standard release shape: push a tag like v1.4.2, a workflow fires on tag push, builds release artifacts, publishes to GitHub Releases / npm / PyPI / ghcr, and posts the changelog.

Components

Tag — created locally with git tag v1.4.2 && git push --tags or via GitHub UI.
Release workflow — listens on on: push: tags: ['v*.*.*'].
Build — produces release artifacts.
Changelog — auto-generated (release-please, changesets, conventional-changelog) or human-written.
GitHub Release — created via softprops/action-gh-release or the gh release create CLI.
Distribution publish — npm, PyPI, ghcr.io, etc., from the same workflow.

Automation level

Choose your spot on the spectrum:

Manual tag — git tag by hand. Simplest.
release-please (Google) — auto-PRs a 'release' commit; merging the PR creates the tag.
changesets (npm-centric) — contributors write changeset files; CI aggregates and tags.
semantic-release — fully automatic from conventional commits.

Code

Release workflow on tag push·yaml

name: release
on:
  push:
    tags: ['v*.*.*']
permissions:
  contents: write   # to create the GitHub Release
  id-token: write   # for trusted publishing to PyPI

jobs:
  release:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with: { fetch-depth: 0 }
      - uses: astral-sh/setup-uv@v3
      - run: uv build
      - name: Generate changelog
        id: changelog
        run: |
          # Crude: list commits since the previous tag
          previous=$(git tag --sort=-creatordate | sed -n 2p)
          {
            echo 'log<<EOF'
            git log --pretty='- %s (%h)' "$previous"..HEAD
            echo 'EOF'
          } >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
      - uses: softprops/action-gh-release@v2
        with:
          files: dist/*
          body: '${{ steps.changelog.outputs.log }}'
      - name: Publish to PyPI (trusted)
        uses: pypa/gh-action-pypi-publish@release/v1

Tag-driven release pipeline

Components

Automation level

Code

External links

Exercise

Progress

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