release

The release-plz release command releases all the unpublished packages.

For example, let's say you have a workspace with two packages: pkg-a (version 0.3.1) and pkg-b (version 0.2.2). The crates.io registry contains pkg-a version 0.3.1, but it doesn't contain pkg-b version 0.2.2 because you didn't publish this version yet. In this case, release-plz would release pkg-b.

For every release, release-plz:

• Creates a git tag named <package_name>-v<version> (e.g. tokio-v1.8.1). <package_name>- is omitted if there's only one package to publish.
• Publishes the package to the cargo registry by running cargo publish.
• Publishes a GitHub/Gitea/GitLab release based on the git tag.

info

release-plz release doesn't edit your Cargo.toml files and doesn't push new commits. It releases the packages as they are in your repository. For this reason, you typically use the release-plz release command in the main branch after you run release-plz update or you merge a pull request opened with release-plz release-pr.

If all packages are already published, the release-plz release command does nothing.

To learn more, run release-plz release --help.

Git Backends

GitHub is the default release-plz backend. You can use the --backend flag to specify a different backend.

Gitlab

release-plz release also supports creating releases for repositories hosted on Gitlab with the --backend gitlab option:

You need to create a token in your Gitlab repo (Settings/Access Tokens) with the following permissions:

• Role: Maintainer or higher
• Scopes:
  • api (to create a release)
  • write_repository (to create tag)

See the Gitlab project access tokens docs.

Then you can run release-plz release with the following arguments:

release-plz release --backend gitlab --git-token <gitlab_token>

Gitea

releases-plz supports creating releases on Gitea with the --backend gitea option.

TODO: document how to create a token on Gitea.

Then you can run release-plz release in Gitea CI with the following arguments:

release-plz release --backend gitea --git-token <gitea_token>

Json output

You can get info about the outcome of this command by appending -o json to the command. Stdout will contain info about the release:

{
  "releases": [
    {
      "package_name": "<package_name>",
      "prs": "<prs>",
      "tag": "<tag_name>",
      "version": "<version>"
    }
  ]
}

Example:

{
  "releases": [
    {
      "package_name": "my_crate",
      "prs": [
        {
          "html_url": "https://github.com/user/proj/pull/1439",
          "number": 1439
        }
      ],
      "tag": "v0.1.0",
      "version": "0.1.0"
    }
  ]
}

If release-plz didn't release any packages, the releases array will be empty.

The tag field

The tag field is present even if the user disabled the tag creation with the git_tag_enable field. This is because the user might want to use the tag name to create the tag by themselves.

The prs field

prs is an array of PRs present in the changelog body of the release. Usually, they are the PRs containing the changes that were released.

Each entry of the array is an object containing:

• html_url: The URL of the PR.
• number: The number of the PR.

What commit is released

info

This is an advanced section that describes certain design choices of release-plz, mainly relevant for repositories with a merge queue enabled. You can skip it if you are just getting started with release-plz or if you are the only maintainer of your repository.

To avoid race conditions when the release PR is merged, release-plz release does a git checkout to the latest commit of the PR before releasing (if the commit of the PR exists in the main branch).

Depending on the merge strategy you use, this can have different effects:

• If you merge with the squash and merge strategy, the git checkout won't happen because when you merge the PR to the main branch, GitHub creates a new commit, so release-plz won't find the commit of the PR and will release the latest commit of the main branch.
• If you merge with the merge strategy (the GitHub default), release-plz will release the last commit of the PR instead of the "Merge pull request" commit created by GitHub.

Takeaway: if you are concerned about PRs being released by mistake (because you have a merge queue enabled or because your repository has multiple maintainers), you should merge release PRs with the default merge strategy. Release-plz will handle the rest, avoiding race conditions happening when the release PR is merged immediately after other PRs that aren't meant to be released. 👍

tip

If you are using the squash and merge strategy, have a look at the release_always field of the configuration

Here's an example of race condition that could happen if release-plz didn't do the git checkout to the latest PR commit:

Merge queue example

1. Person A adds PR 20 to the merge queue (e.g. @bors r+).
2. Person B adds PR 21 to the merge queue.
3. PR 20 is merged into main.
4. Person A sees PR 20 is merged and adds the release PR (PR 22) to the merge queue.
5. PR 21 is merged into main.
6. PR 22 is merged into main. The release-plz release-pr workflow for PR 21 didn't finish in time, so the release PR is out of date.
7. main's workflow runs that does the publish for PR 22.

flowchart LR
  pr20(["PR 20 (fix)"])
  pr20_merge["main
  (PR 20 merge commit)"]
  pr21(["PR 21 (breaking change)"])
  pr21_merge["main
  (PR 21 merge commit)"]
  pr22(["PR 22 (release)"])
  pr22_merge["main
  (PR 22 merge commit)"]
  main --> pr20
  main --> pr20_merge
  pr20 --> pr20_merge
  main --> pr21
  pr20_merge --> pr21_merge
  pr21 --> pr21_merge
  pr20_merge --> pr22
  pr22 --> pr22_merge
  pr21_merge --> pr22_merge

This means that if release-plz didn't do the git checkout, your release would include changes from PR 21 which will be missing from the changelog and might contain breaking changes.

However, thanks to the git checkout to the latest commit of the PR, if the release PR was merged into main with the default merge strategy, then this race condition doesn't happen because the ancestor of the latest commit of PR 22 is PR 20, not PR 21.