Make a Release

Make a release of a Python package. This automates the tedious steps you need to go through to make a release--bumping the version number, tagging, etc.

It does not (currently) create distributions or upload them to PyPI.

Usage

make-release --version 1.0 --next-version 2.0

Steps

By default, all the following steps are run:

• Run the project's test suite (python -m unittest discover by default)
• Prepare the release by bumping the version number in various files and setting the release date in the change log file
• Merge the development branch into the target branch (e.g., dev to main)
• Create an annotated tag pointing at the merge commit (or at the prep commit when merging is disabled); if no tag name is specified, the release version is used as the tag name
• Resume development by bumping the version to the next anticipated version

Any of the steps can be skipped by passing the corresponding --no-<step> flag.

Tag Name

The tag name can be specified as a simple format string template. The project name and release version will be injected (see below in the Configuration section for an example).

Configuration

Configuration can be done in pyproject.toml or setup.cfg. This is most useful if you want to permanently change one of the default options.

Use the long names of the command line options without the leading dashes. For command line flags, set the value to true or false (1 and 0 also work).

For example, if your project only uses a single branch, you could disable the merge step like so in pyproject.toml.

# pyproject.toml
[tool.make-release.args]
merge = false
tag-name = "{name}-{version}"
test-command = "my-test-runner"

or like so in setup.cfg:

# setup.cfg
[make-release.args]
merge = false
tag-name = {name}-{version}
test-command = my-test-runner

This also shows how to specify a tag name template that's derived from the package name and the release version.

Creating and Uploading Distribution

Once you've created a release with this tool, check out the tag for the release and then run the following commands:

poetry build           # if using poetry
python setup.py sdist  # if using pip/setuptools
twine upload dist/*    # in either case

NOTE: You'll need an account on pypi.org in order to upload distributions with twine.

Limitations

• Only git repositories are supported
• The package name detection assumes the root directory (i.e., the git repo name) is the same as the package name
• For the change log, only markdown files are supported; the change log is expected to use second-level (##) headings for each version's section (see this project's CHANGELOG.md for an example)
• Doesn't build or upload distributions