Snapshot Release

A snapshot publishes the current state of any branch as a temporary version — try a feature branch in a real consumer before it is merged, without touching the repository: no commits, no tags, no changelog.

The snapshot flow bumps the version to a timestamped prerelease and publishes it under the given npm dist-tag. A repository released as 1.1.0 with a feat commit on the branch produces something like:

1.1.0 -> 1.2.0-canary.20260707111020

The version is derived from the commits as usual, and the snapshot identifier is always applied — even with no new commits the version falls back to a patch bump, so a snapshot can never collide with a real released version. The latest dist-tag is never touched.

Setup

Snapshots run on demand from any branch, so they get their own workflow with a workflow_dispatch trigger:

.github/workflows/snapshot.yml

name: Snapshot
on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      tag:
        description: Snapshot tag
        type: string
        required: true
        default: snapshot
jobs:
  snapshot:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: Snapshot
    permissions:
      contents: read
    steps:
      - name: Checkout the repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v7
      - name: Install pnpm
        uses: pnpm/action-setup@v6
        with:
          version: 11
      - name: Install Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v6
        with:
          node-version: 22
          cache: 'pnpm'
          registry-url: 'https://registry.npmjs.org'
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: pnpm install
      - name: Publish snapshot
        uses: TrigenSoftware/simple-release-action@v2
        with:
          workflow: snapshot
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          npm-token: ${{ secrets.NPM_TOKEN }}
          bump-snapshot: ${{ inputs.tag }}

The tag input doubles as the prerelease identifier and the npm dist-tag the snapshot is published under.

With trusted publishing the snapshot job moves into the release workflow instead, because the trusted publisher is registered per workflow file.

Running it

Go to Actions → Snapshot → Run workflow, pick the branch and the tag, and run — or from the CLI:

gh workflow run snapshot.yml --ref my-feature-branch -f tag=canary

The published snapshot is then a one-liner away in any consumer project:

npm i your-package@canary

In a monorepo all packages are snapshotted in one run, each from its own version — for example 1.1.0 and 1.0.0 packages become 1.1.1-canary.20260707111020 and 1.0.1-canary.20260707111020 under the same canary tag.