Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The current pre-release approach with the beta branch has several drawbacks:
- It does not allow releasing and testing a single, specific feature in isolation: any pre-release must include all other features already merged into the beta branch.
- Releasing changes from the pre-release beta branch requires manual adjustment of commit messages, which is inconvenient and does not align with a modern, automated CI/CD workflow.
Describe the solution you'd like
I’d like to be able to create a pre-release directly from a feature branch, without merging it into the beta or main branch, and to trigger this process on demand. One of the following approaches could be used:
- semantic-release (it supports pre-releases from feature branches), with the following potential pitfalls:
- semantic-release does not natively support monorepos (worth checking https://github.com/pmowrer/semantic-release-monorepo).
- It’s unclear whether semantic-release can be configured to run only on demand.
- There may be conflicts in changelog generation between semantic-release and the release-please tool.
- Custom release script, triggered when:
- A pre-release label is added to a feature PR.
- New commits are pushed to an already labeled PR.
Additional context
I initially considered using workflow_dispatch, but GitHub currently does not support branch selection for it (see https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/56891).
My proposal is to first double-check whether semantic-release can realistically be used on demand. I strongly suspect this is not possible. If that assumption is confirmed, I suggest focusing on the custom release script approach triggered by PR labeling.
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The current pre-release approach with the beta branch has several drawbacks:
Describe the solution you'd like
I’d like to be able to create a pre-release directly from a feature branch, without merging it into the beta or main branch, and to trigger this process on demand. One of the following approaches could be used:
Additional context
I initially considered using workflow_dispatch, but GitHub currently does not support branch selection for it (see https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/56891).
My proposal is to first double-check whether semantic-release can realistically be used on demand. I strongly suspect this is not possible. If that assumption is confirmed, I suggest focusing on the custom release script approach triggered by PR labeling.