Automatic releases using GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is an awesome new feature for GitHub users who want to automate some parts of their workflow. As proof of concept, I created a workflow that will do the following:

• When a Pull Request is closed create a new release if certain conditions are met:
  1. The pull request must have been merged (i.e. not just closed without merge)
  2. The pull request is from a branch with a name release/-prefix
• Create a new tag using the name from the pull request’s title
• Create a new release associated with the newly created tag
  • The release’s name is the same as the tag and is from the pull request’s title
  • The release’s body if the body from the pull request

Example workflow: .github/workflows/main.yml:

name: Create release
on:
  pull_request:
    types: [closed]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: Create Release
      if: github.event.pull_request.merged == true && startsWith(github.event.pull_request.head.ref, 'release/')
      uses: actions/create-release@latest
      env:
        GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
      with:
        tag_name: ${{ github.event.pull_request.title }}
        release_name: ${{ github.event.pull_request.title }}
        body: ${{ github.event.pull_request.body }}

Ideas for future changes:

• Instead a using a branch name prefix, check for the existance of a label
• Auto create tag name (semantic versioning, increase by one, etc)

References:

• Event Types & Payloads - developer.github.com
• GitHub Action - Releases API - github.com