@restfulhead/auto-plugin-filter-by-workspace-path

NPM Auto plugin - Filter by workspace path

A plugin for Intuit's Auto package that filters out commits that only have files outside the current workspace directory. This can be helpful, for example in mono repositories using NPM workspaces, where you run auto on each sub package individually and would like to include only commits relevant to the sub-package.

Setup

To start using this plugin, add it to your .autorc config, for example:

{
  "plugins": [
    ["@restfulhead/auto-plugin-filter-by-workspace-path",{"npm":true}],
    "npm",
  ]
}

Then, if your project uses NPM workspaces and you run e.g. auto changelog not from the root directory, but directly from a workspace directory, then the changelog will only include pull requests that contain files inside the current workspace directory.

However, carefully read the following caveats section.

Supported Config

Parameter	Description	Default
npm	Boolean to use NPM workspaces or not. In case you're using auto without NPM, specify "npm": false, this way the plugin will filter out changes outside of the current folder auto is run from.	true

Caveats

• Note that this plugin also omits commits that
  • do not have a related pull request (e.g. pushed directly to the release branch)
  • belong to pull requests that has the skip-release label attached
  • have [skip ci] in their commit message
• This plugin modifies the behavior of auto version. By default, it seems to set the version to patch instead of noVersion even if all commits were omitted. With this plugin, noVersion is returned if there are no relevant commits.
• You can't use the shipit command, because for example, the version in each package should only contain the version number (e.g. v1.0.0), but the tag and Github release must include the package name to avoid ambigious release names/tags. Maybe this customization can be added to the plugin in future. (Contributions welcome!)
  • However, you can use individual commands to make this work. To see how to setup a release process that takes all of this into account, take a look at the release.yml GitHub action in this repository.
• If you create merge-commits against your release/target branch, then changes to files in your release/target branch become part of the commit also. Those currently won't be filtered out. I'm not sure if there is a way to detect/filter out those files in a commit that are caused by the merge while keeping the "actual" changed files. If so, this would be a good issue to fix. In the meantime, you can add a label skip-release to the merge PR to exclude it completely. This on the other hand only works if you're working with a separate release branch. For example:
  • Create a new pull request from you feature branch against your main branch. Label it e.g. with release-minor.
  • Merge the changes into main, but don't release from main.
  • Create another pull request to merge changes from main into your release branch. Label it with skip-release.
  • Merge this PR into your release branch and then run the release process from this branch.