Better Release PRs with brel

I really like release-plz for my Rust projects (balzac uses it); it’s easy to configure, it automatically updates the relevant version fields (in cargo.toml) and can even update the CHANGELOG.md of your repo. There’s only one problem: it only works with Rust. So I decided to make my own.

Better Releases

better releases is a tool that works on any Github repo, with any language and any stack. It uses a simple-ysh brel.toml file and:

• reads the commit from the previous tag (if it exists)
• figures out the next tag based on conventional commits
• opens/updates a release pr

Once the pr is merged, it can optionally publish the detected tag to potentially trigger other workflows; in the drizzle-sluggable repo, this is what I use to trigger publishing the package to npm.

Getting Started

To get started, you need to install brel (better-releases’ main tool); if you don’t want to, you can also run it with

npx brel@latest init

The init command will ask some question to setup the base config and will generate the base workflow for Github Actions. Here’s what the config file might look like

default_branch = "main"

But we can do so much better than that.

Bumping Package versions

Honestly, this feature is why I decided to build this tool: I wanted to be able to update versions across toml and json files (Rust, Javascript, PHP) with a single tool. Let’s see how we can do this.

For a package.json file, we might want to bump the version field; with Brel, you can just do:

[release_pr.version_updates]
"package.json" = ["version"]

But that’s not all! Imagine you want to update the version inside a lock file (though you probably shouldn’t do this in CI), you can also pass selectors when selecting an array:

[release_pr.version_updates]
"Cargo.toml" = ["package.version"]
"Cargo.lock" = ["package[name=brel].version"]

You might notice there’s a .lock file in there; you can override the filetype like this:

[release_pr.format_overrides]
"Cargo.lock" = "toml"

Pushing a Tag

Let’s say we want to add automatic tag creation when merging the release branch; we can do so with a few config changes

[release_pr.tagging]
enabled = true
tag_template = "{version}"

With this setup, merging the branch will create a tag corresponding to the version, like 0.7.0

Generating/Updating a Changelog

When enabled, Brel integrates with Git Cliff to automatically update a CHANGELOG.MD file. Here’s how you might configure this:

[release_pr.changelog]
enabled = true
output_file = "CHANGELOG.md"

This will automatically update the CHANGELOG.md file using Git Cliff

There’s more

I will not bore you with everything Brel can do (you can even customize the template used for the pr body), but if you want to give it a try here’s the official website and the github repo; do try it out if you have need of a tool like this and let me know what you think!