bump 🌻

Simple, cross-platform CLI tool to help draft a GitHub Release for the next semantic version of your project.

• Zero runtime dependencies (not even git).
• Auto-detects current repo if in cloned repository.
• Can work without any API authorization at all.

This is intentionally designed to work with the GitHub web site interface for drafting releases, and does not even require you to have the source code checked out locally.

Usage

$ bump --help
Usage: bump <owner> <repo>

If you are in a git repository that has been cloned from GitHub, owner and
repo args can be omitted, in which case they will be inferred from the remote
origin.

Flags:
    --no-open           Do not automatically open publish URL in browser.
    --verbose, -v       Verbose output.
    --version           Print version and exit.
    --help              Print help and exit.

Environment:
    $BUMP_NO_OPEN       Global default for --no-open
    $BUMP_VERBOSE       Global default for --verbose
    $GITHUB_TOKEN       Optional, will use if present to access private repos

Doing this:

➡️ Automatically opens this in your browser:

Where you can edit your release notes before clicking Publish Release.

Afterwards, if you have a local checkout of the repository, you may wish to do git fetch to pull all remote tags to your system. 👀

Installation

Download from the Releases page and put somewhere in your $PATH.

Homebrew users can brew install mroth/tap/bump.

Comparison

Unlike many of these release tools, bump is currently intended to support workflows where rather than pushing tags locally, new releases are primarily drafted via the Github Releases web interface (all the easier to drag your animated GIFs in, and whatnot.)

This may not be the correct workflow for your project! In particular, it really works best in environments where there is not a version number file that stored in version control itself (Node NPM, Rust Cargo), but rather those where the git tags themselves manage the versioning (Go modules, sbt-git, etc.)

Some related tools I found in looking at this you may wish to consider as alternatives:

• sindresorhus/np For NPM projects, this is really good. We've adopted it for all our JS native projects at @openlawteam, in conjunction with --no-publish.
• goreleaser For Go projects, this tool is quite nice. In fact, it works well in partnership with bump: let bump manage your releases and changelog, and but goreleaser running in CI to build and add the binaries to the release. (See the configuration for this project.)
• zeit/release Fairly close to what we wanted, but it does a git tag/commit and pushes to GitHub before drafting the release, and requires API authorization. Javascript based.