semantic-release-build

Run build script before publishing with semantic-release

• The problem
• The solution
• Setup
  • Basic setup
  • Extended setup

The problem

Lets say you like the comfort of making semantic-release publishing your work to npm and/or Github (you should!) but your build step requires the version to be present in package.json to make it work. This works with earlier versions of semantic-release (<8), but not with the newer ones (>8).

The solution

semantic-release-build is a fairly simple and rather naïve approach to the problem. It's a plugin for the publish-hook for semantic-release. It will simply spawn npm run build (or yarn) after semantic-release has set the version in your package.json.

Setup

The plugin is supposed to run inside the publish-hook for semantic-release. You don't have to set npm or yarn explicitly. By default it will run npm run build. But if yarn is available in your path (which yarn) and if a yarn.lock-file is present in your projects root it will run yarn run build.

Basic setup

Inside package.json:

"release": {
  "verifyConditions": "...your other plugins settings",
  "publish": [
    "semantic-release-build",
    "@semantic-release/npm",
    "@semantic-release/github"
  ]
}

Disclaimer: Make sure that semantic-release-build runs before other plugins, otherwise it will have no effect.

Extended setup

semantic-release-build can be customized in one way – you can specify flags to attatch to your npm run build call.

Note that you don't have to attatch the extra -- which is usually required by npm. It will be attatched for you. This is to make it work seamlessly between npm and yarn.

Inside package.json:

"release": {
  "verifyConditions": "...your other plugins settings",
  "publish": [
    {
      "path": "semantic-release-build",
      "flags": "--out-dir build"
    }
  ]
}