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Simple Release

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

Section titled “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.

Running it

Section titled “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.