Introduction

Simple Release automates the release routine: it reads your git history, determines the next version, updates manifests and changelogs, creates tags and releases, and publishes packages — all in one run. You write commit messages that follow Conventional Commits, and the tool does the rest, powered by conventional-changelog under the hood.

• 📄 Parses commits to determine the next version and generate a changelog.
• 🗂️ Supports monorepos — releases multiple packages in a single run, in fixed or independent versioning mode.
• 🧩 Project types, package managers, and hostings are addons — extensible to any stack.
• 🚀 Ships a GitHub Action that runs the whole flow in CI: a release pull request, released on merge.

New to Conventional Commits?

Start with The Complete Guide — it walks through the commit format and how to wire up a fully automated release pipeline.

Where to start

Automate releases on GitHub

Add the GitHub Action with a couple of files: a config describing your project and a release workflow. No dependencies to install — the action downloads the addons itself.

Script your own release

Use the JS API to build a custom release pipeline for any CI — or a custom adapter for your project type, package manager, or hosting.

Not just for JavaScript

Simple Release is written in JavaScript, but it is platform agnostic by design. A project is described by an adapter: the manifest knows how to read and write the version file, the project knows how to bump and publish. The bundled addons cover npm, pnpm, and GitHub Actions projects, and you can write your own for a Python package, a Go module, or anything else with a version and a changelog.

With the JSON config and the GitHub Action, a non-JavaScript project doesn’t even need a package.json — the action installs the addons named in the config by itself.