DevOps: Integrate Release Drafter to automate releases and npm publish

[joeyklee]

Dear ml5 community,

I'm submitting a new issue. Please see the details below.

→ Step 1: Describe the issue 📝

Did you find a bug? Want to suggest an idea for feature?

• This is a devOps ticket to integrate release drafter: https://github.com/release-drafter/release-drafter
• The goal is to use github actions to automate publishing our NPM package when we tag a release in Github.
• The hope is that this will make it easier to tag releases and make more frequent and smaller releases of the library. This way we no longer have to do this via the terminal among other parts of the process that are error prone -- e.g. having to update version numbers in our package json and elsewhere!

I've never set this up myself, but I figure this is a good chance to try!

Progress

• Installed release-drafter on the ml5-library
• define actions yaml
• setup tags
• TBD...

[joeyklee]

Oops, OK so #1266 didn't run the npm publish task... looking into this now 🙈

[joeyklee]

Oh yay this seems to be working! https://github.com/ml5js/ml5-library/actions/runs/1726425467 Fingers crossed 😂

[joeyklee]

Oops seems like we need to fix how the auth token secret gets to that workflow: https://github.com/ml5js/ml5-library/runs/4890698033?check_suite_focus=true 🙈

[joeyklee]

Updating this in the npm auth settings

[joeyklee]

Hmm, I'm going to take a break, since I keep running into these errors here on the npm ci step: https://github.com/ml5js/ml5-library/runs/4891282431?check_suite_focus=true

It seems like it nearly worked earlier -- failing on npm publish so I'm not 100% sure why we're seeing this error pop up on package installation step 😢

I'll try to revisit this soon. In case anyone else has any ideas, I'd be happy to have help! TY!

[joeyklee]

Woohoo! it worked! https://github.com/ml5js/ml5-library/runs/4901877071?check_suite_focus=true

[joeyklee]

OK SO

Here's where we are at now:
To make an ml5 release:

1. make your feature PR
2. make sure to tag it with one of the following in the PR:
   • SEMVER/patch
   • SEMVER/minor
   • SEMVER/major
3. bump the package version number that matches the SEMVER/patch | SEMVER/minor | SEMVER/major
4. run npm i <--- this makes sure your bumped package version makes it into the packagelock.json
5. run npm run update:readme <----- captures the version bump in the readme
6. run git add .
7. run git commit -m "chore: bumps package"
8. push this to your feature branch.

Once we merge the PR to main:

1. simply go to the releases sidebar >

2. go to the latest draft and click the edit button

3. click: publish the release

---

Here's what's left for the next steps:

1. automate the npm version tag number from the release-drafter into the workflow