cargo smart-release

Fearlessly release workspace crates without dealing with dependencies or versions.

Installation

Cargo

Via cargo, which can be obtained using rustup

cargo install cargo-smart-release

Preferred workflow

When developing various crates in a workspace I tend to edit code, and depending on the kind of edit, either increase the patch level, minor version or major version right after, depending on the basic rules of semver. Use cargo smart-release --bump minor --skip-tag --skip-publish --execute for this which has the benefit of it automatically adjusting other workspace dependencies when needed.

When ready for relasing a particular crate or set of crates of interest, run cargo smart-release [<crate-name> ...] to simulate a release. For particularly thorough but error-prone simulations (as in false positives) one could run cargo smart-release --dry-run-cargo-publish. After evaluating the release procedure and following instructions, one should end up with a fully automatic release of multiple crates. There are various other options that shouldn't be needed in the common case, use cargo smart-release --help to see them.

Features

• [x] safe to use as actually performing an operation requires the --execute flag
• [x] avoid inconsistent states by making operations as atomic as possible, leveraging gitoxide technology to the fullest
• [x] handle workspace dependencies and cycles gracefully, allowing one invocation to publish multiple crates
• [x] avoid making any releases if there are no changes
• [x] avoid bumping versions if the current version isn't released, allowing you to control the version by editing the cargo manifest
• [x] automatically release dependent workspace pre-release crates along with the desired one if they changed since their last release
• [x] automatically adjust manifest versions and update manifests of crates which use those whose versions were incremented
• [x] use git tags to know if a crate changed at all, skipping publishes if there is no code change at all
• [ ] handle version specifications correctly (tables vs values)
• [ ] handle all version comparators correctly (see here for how it's done)
• [ ] Automatically detect if crate changes are breaking to suggest the correct version increment

Comparison to cargo release

cargo-release is the reason this tool exists, as it got me addicted to an all automatic release workflow that knows git. This works perfectly for simple workspaces or single-crate workspaces, as of 2021-08-12, so use it: cargo install cargo-release.

Here is what cargo smart-release does differently: "It tries really hard to do what I want most of the time when publishing workspace gitoxide crates".

• be safe to execute, so it's disarmed by default
• specify one ore more crates, and detect which crates need publishing automatically
• handle dependency cycles in such a way that increases the chances of overall success
• try really hard to not leave the workspace in an inconsistent state when something goes wrong
• be a playground for gitoxide to have a reason to make it much more convenient and more feasible for application authors (aka dog-fooding)

Limitations

• it's very young and probably tries to eat underwear
• it needs a git repository to govern the workspace
• it requires tables to be used when specifying versions, i.e. crate = { version = "1" } instead of `crate = "1".
• it gracefully fails when encountering version requirement comparators which are not ^, like =
• it's tested only by using it on gitoxide, there are no regression tests at all

Acknowledgements

Thanks to [cargo release] for showing the way, but also motivating me to finally take full control of releases.