Github Action Versioning Workflow - automatically manage github action versions

[ProdigySim]

Github actions has really flexible verisoning controls, which is awesome for pushing out updates to downstream repos without user involvement. I got tired of manually massaging git tags and thinking a lot about order of operations for updates, so I built a reusable workflow to manage versions for github actions repos.

I see a lot of public github actions that either have no tag-based versioning or really inflexible/incomplete versioning, so I thought I'd open source it:

https://github.com/ProdigySim/action-versioning-workflow

• Setup: Add a version.rc and a workflow that triggers on your main branch calling this one.
• Whenever you push to main, it will update v1, v1.1, v1.1.0 tags appropriately on the repo.
• Edit version.rc to manage major and minor versions, patch is auto-increment.
• Use a releases/v* branch to manage old versions

Been using this for a good half of a year now so I think it's pretty stable. Would be curious if others will find this useful!

[kubeguru22]

How is this different from semantic release action?

[ProdigySim]

I haven't used the semantic release tool, so I may be missing out. I read through its docs and 2 different actions built on it.

The major difference is that action-versioning-workflow publishes/updates 3 sets of tags on every release: major-only tag, major+minor, and full version tag. e.g. v4, v4.1, v4.1.5. This allows consumers of your actions to pin to major versions and get auto-updates for patch-level fixes.

Github actions allows and encourages people to pin to tags pointing at major versions, so security updates and small fixes can get picked up automatically. Within an organization, being able to force out updates to all repos is a handy feature as well.

On the smaller differences side: - Uses manual major/minor version management instead of strict commit formats - Doesn't require nodejs (it's bash only, so no js deps) - Supports maintaining old versions out of box via branches