git-release

Release Manager

Create semantic version releases with automated changelog generation from conventional commits, version file updates, and GitHub release publishing.

Quality Guidelines

Release operations are high-consequence and irreversible once pushed:

1. Verify every change: analyze actual commits, not assumptions
2. Confirm version bump: the detected semver bump must match the change scope
3. Validate changelog: every entry must correspond to a real commit
4. User approval required: confirm before executing anything in Phase 5

Workflow

Phase 1: Collect Commits Since Last Tag

1. Find the latest tag:

git describe --tags --abbrev=0 2>/dev/null || echo "none"

• If no tags exist, collect all commits on the current branch
• If a tag exists, collect commits since that tag

1. Collect commits:

# With existing tag
git log <last-tag>..HEAD --format="%H %s" --no-merges

# Without existing tag (first release)
git log --format="%H %s" --no-merges

1. Validate preconditions:

• Working tree is clean: git status --porcelain
• On the expected branch (main/master or release branch)
• Remote is up to date: git fetch origin && git log HEAD..origin/$(git branch --show-current) --oneline
• If there are no commits since the last tag, abort with a clear message
• Unless --no-github or --changelog-only, gh auth status must pass; if it fails, stop and ask the user to fix it. Requires gh (brew install gh, then gh auth login).

Phase 2: Auto-detect version bump

1. Parse each commit using conventional commit format:

• Extract type: feat, fix, docs, style, refactor, perf, test, build, ci, chore, revert
• Extract scope (optional): text in parentheses after type
• Detect breaking changes: ! after type/scope OR BREAKING CHANGE: in commit body
• For non-conventional commits, classify as other

This is plain regex/string parsing over commit subjects, do it inline regardless of commit count, no agent needed.