Expublish

Automate SemVer and best practices for elixir package releases.

How to install

Add :expublish to your dev dependencies in mix.exs:

{:expublish, "~> 2.1", only: [:dev]}

Create a CHANGELOG.md in the root folder of your project. It must contain a placeholder:

<!-- %% CHANGELOG_ENTRIES %% -->

Do not keep track of the release file, as it's deleted with every successful release. Put the following line in your .gitignore:

RELEASE.md

How to use

1. Create a new RELEASE.md containing the new changelog entry:

$ echo "- changelog entry one\n- changelog entry two" > RELEASE.md

2. Run one of mix expublish.(major|minor|patch):

$ mix expublish.minor

3. That's it!

About the package

Using mix expublish guarantees:

A clean git working directory
Passing tests
Increased version in mix.exs
A new changelog entry
A new version git commit and tag

Expublish was built with a fully automated continuous release process in mind. This is why it makes some expectations and automatically pushes and publishes the new package version to git and hex respectively.

This and other behavior can be changed using various options. Here are the commonly used ones:

# Go through all the task steps without any writing changes (no commit, no tag, no push, no publish):
$ mix expublish.minor --dry-run

# Do not push the new version commit and tag to git and do not publish the new package on hex:
$ mix expublish.minor --disable-push --disable-publish

# Skip the test run:
$ mix expublish.minor --disable-test

# Ignore untracked files in git check before creating a new release:
$ mix expublish.minor --allow-untracked

# Push the git commit to a different branch and/or remote
$ mix expublish.minor --branch=release --remote=upstream

Reference

The mix task is defined as:

mix expublish.[level] [options]

Level

Level	Description
`major`	When making incompatible API changes.
`minor`	When adding functionality in a backwards compatible manner.
`patch`	When making backwards compatible bug fixes.

Options

Option	Default	Description
`-h, --help`	`false`	Print help.
`-d, --dry-run`	`false`	Perform dry run (no writes, no commits).
`--allow-untracked`	`false`	Skip untracked files when checking git porcelain.
`--disable-test`	`false`	Disable test run.
`--disable-publish`	`false`	Disable hex publish.
`--disable-push`	`false`	Disable git push.
`--branch=string`	`"master"`	Remote branch for git push.
`--remote=string`	`"origin"`	Remote name for git push.

Apart from the mix task, Expublish exposes a public interface which can be used to create new releases from other elixir applications or scripts.