release-please for automated changelog and release PR generation

Manually maintaining CHANGELOGs and bumping version numbers is error-prone and forgotten under pressure. Releases go out without a changelog, or with incorrect version numbers that violate semantic versioning.

Configure release-please to automate releases from conventional commits:

# .github/workflows/release.yml
on:
  push:
    branches: [main]

jobs:
  release-please:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: googleapis/release-please-action@v4
        id: release
        with:
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          release-type: node

      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        if: ${{ steps.release.outputs.release_created }}

      - name: Publish to npm
        if: ${{ steps.release.outputs.release_created }}
        run: npm publish
        env:
          NODE_AUTH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.NPM_TOKEN }}

release-please.json for monorepo:

{
  "packages": {
    "packages/api": { "release-type": "node" },
    "packages/web": { "release-type": "node" }
  }
}

release-please reads conventional commit messages (feat:, fix:, feat!:) to determine version bumps and generates the CHANGELOG automatically. The release PR is opened automatically and merged when you are ready to release.