Introduction

simple-release-action runs the whole release flow in your CI: on every push to the main branch it creates or updates a release pull request with the version bump and changelog, and when that pull request is merged, it tags, publishes, and creates the GitHub release.

Setting it up takes two files — a config describing the project and a release workflow. The action reads the addon query from the config and installs the addons itself, so your repository needs no extra dependencies. See Release Automation for the full setup.

Merge release pull requests with squash

The release job recognizes the release commit by its chore(release): ... message. Use squash merge for release pull requests (and ideally for all pull requests) — a regular merge commit hides the release message and the release job will not run.

Workflows

The workflow input selects what the action does in the current job:

Workflow	Description
full	Detect the context and run the pull request or release flow. The default.
check	Determine which workflow should run and skip unnecessary runs — used as the first job.
pull-request	Create or update the release pull request.
release	Tag, publish, and create the release — runs on the release commit.
snapshot	Publish a temporary snapshot version.

Inputs

Input	Description
workflow	Workflow to run. Defaults to full.
github-token	GitHub token to authenticate with the GitHub API. Required.
npm-token	npm token for publishing. Passed to the NODE_AUTH_TOKEN environment variable.
publish-token	Generic token for the config file. Passed to the PUBLISH_TOKEN environment variable.
branch	Branch to store release changes and create the pull request from. Defaults to simple-release.
bump-version	Force a specific version.
bump-as	Force a release type: major, minor, patch, or prerelease.
bump-prerelease	Pre-release identifier, e.g. alpha or beta.
bump-snapshot	Snapshot pre-release identifier.
bump-first-release	Treat the current version as the first release. Auto-detected by default.
bump-skip	Skip the version bump.
bump-by-project	JSON object with per-project bump options for monorepos.
maintenance-branch	Create maintenance branches for previous major versions.
publish-skip	Skip publishing.
publish-access	Package access level: public or restricted.
publish-tag	npm tag for the publication.