Recently, in a professional-but-not-work-associated Slack I’m part of, someone paid me what I feel is the highest compliment I have received in recent memory. There was a discussion around a bit of a thorny topic, and I had chosen to engage and try to get a better idea of the views of folks in that discussion. After many rounds, someone had this to say about me:

For what it’s worth, I think Josh has disagreed with a lot of folks in this thread at one point or another and has been unfailingly respectful and open.

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In this post I wanted to document some exploration I did around using GitHub Actions to automatically generate a semantic versioning compatible tag in certain circumstances. I’m going to assume the reader has a basic knowledge of both GitHub Actions and semantic versioning.

Requirements

Here are the requirements I’m trying to meet:

• Upon commit to the trunk branch, a new tag and release is created.
• There must be an easy way to indicate whether the release is a major, minor, or patch release.

There’s a number of assumptions that I’m going to go by since situations outside of these might complicate this initial investigation.

As of late I’ve been doing a lot of work with GitHub Actions, so in an attempt to minimize the number of technologies I’m using in my side projects I’ve converted this blog to using them for its build and deploy process. Overall, the experience was painless; the only hiccups were things not directly related to GitHub Actions (like forgetting to set the default region for the AWS CLI). The steps were: