[*] Feature: Automated nightly releases

[etrepum]

Description

Refactor release workflow to use reusable workflows so the work can be shared

Add a nightly workflow to create a release every night in the nightly channel

Maintain release channel branches (latest__release, nightly__release) so that we will have the option to build the docs site from the latest released version instead of or in addition to main (#6144)

Closes #6169

Test plan

• Try creating a release to make sure that still works
• See if it works when the cron job runs?
• I created very similar workflows and scripts in this repo to see if it should work and it did https://github.com/etrepum/lexical-builder

Future Considerations

• Fix release process to use the same tag for both GitHub and NPM releases (the nightly release does not have this issue, only manual workflow_dispatch releases with a PR)
• Do not do a nightly release when there are no changes since the last one

[vercel]

The latest updates on your projects. Learn more about Vercel for Git ↗︎

Name	Status	Preview	Comments	Updated (UTC)
lexical	✅ Ready (Inspect)	Visit Preview	💬 Add feedback	May 30, 2024 3:06pm
lexical-playground	✅ Ready (Inspect)	Visit Preview	💬 Add feedback	May 30, 2024 3:06pm

[github-actions]

size-limit report 📦

Path	Size
lexical	23.95 KB (0%)
@lexical/rich-text	34.64 KB (0%)
@lexical/plain-text	34.62 KB (0%)
@lexical/react	149.36 KB (0%)

[potatowagon]

hello thanks for this! pardon my qns:

1. what are the signals for when the release is happening? do we monitor in the actions tab for when the release workflows (im assuming call-npm-publish.yml) is running?

2. is there a way to automate the freezing? so PRs dont accidentally get merged while the release is happening.

[etrepum]

Those are process questions that I don't have answers for, I'm merely documenting the way I've been told it works, but I did add some notes about the risk. @ivailop7 or @acywatson may be able to provide more detail. I think the answer might be that releases happen fairly quickly and PRs don't get merged that often when several core maintainers are working on a release so the potential inconsistency is just ignored.

I think we should change it so that this isn't a concern, but the scope of this PR is to enable nightly releases and not to change the existing release process.

[etrepum]

The signal that a release is happening would be a release PR is up. Hopefully they would run the npm publish immediately after merge. That said, there are straightforward ways to change the process so that there is not a reason to freeze main, but that is out of scope here.

[etrepum]

Just FYI the repository that I was testing this with is correctly doing nightly releases by cron job

• https://github.com/etrepum/lexical-builder/actions/runs/9312104213 ran the nightly release branch action
• https://github.com/etrepum/lexical-builder/branches has a nightly__release branch that is up to date
• https://github.com/etrepum/lexical-builder/tags has a v0.0.3-nightly.20240531.0 tag
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/@etrepum/lexical-builder?activeTab=versions has a 0.0.3-nightly.20240531.0 release

[ivailop7]

We'll need @acywatson for this one