Manage pre-releases

With release-it, it's easy to create pre-releases: a version of your software that you want to make available, while it's not in the stable semver range yet. Often "alpha", "beta", and "rc" (release candidate) are used as identifier for pre-releases.

An example. The awesome-pkg is at version 1.3.0, and work is done for a new major update. To publish the latest beta of the new major version:

bash

release-it major --preRelease=beta

This will tag and release version 2.0.0-beta.0. Notes:

A normal npm install of awesome-pkg will still be at version 1.3.0.
The npm tag will be "beta", install it using npm install awesome-pkg@beta
A GitHub release will be marked as a "Pre-release".

The above command is actually a shortcut for:

bash

release-it premajor --preReleaseId=beta --npm.tag=beta --github.preRelease

Consecutive beta releases (2.0.0-beta.1 and so on):

bash

release-it --preRelease

And when ready to release the next phase (e.g. release candidate, in this case 2.0.0-rc.0):

bash

release-it --preRelease=rc

And eventually, for 2.0.0:

bash

release-it major

When all commits since the latest major tag should be added to the changelog, use --git.tagExclude:

bash

release-it major --git.tagExclude='*[-]*'

This will find the latest major matching tag, excluding the pre-release tags, which normally include - in their name.

Let's go back to when the latest release was 2.0.0-rc.0. We added new features, which we don't want in the v2 release yet, but instead in a later v2.1. A new pre-release id can be made for the minor release after in 2.1.0-alpha.0:

bash

release-it preminor --preRelease=alpha

Use --preReleaseBase=1 to start counting at 1. The first example at 1.3.0 will now bump to 2.0.0-beta.1 instead:

bash

release-it major --preRelease=beta --preReleaseBase=1

Notes:

Pre-releases work in tandem with recommended bumps.
You can still override individual options, e.g. release-it --preRelease=rc --npm.tag=next.
See semver.org for more details about semantic versioning.