Install release-it globally

[webpro]

First of all, nice repo! :)

I saw a step in the release process saying "install release-it globally", and I traced it down to this repository. But I wonder whether this is the best option?

Generally it's good practice to add release-it to the devDependencies, so it will also automatically receive updates. Also, it's one manual step less in this process.

This could all be automated from the script in this repo, only the command to release would change from release-it to e.g. npm run release (or yarn release).

What do you think?

[rwjblue]

@webpro - Hey thanks for taking a look!

This could all be automated from the script in this repo, only the command to release would change from release-it to e.g. npm run release (or yarn release).

This has non-trivial issues when using yarn. Specifically, even with publishOptions with registry set (which we do), calling yarn release does not work properly.

Generally it's good practice to add release-it to the devDependencies, so it will also automatically receive updates. Also, it's one manual step less in this process.

I actually do add release-it in devDependencies (see here).

I saw a step in the release process saying "install release-it globally", and I traced it down to this repository. But I wonder whether this is the best option?

My workflow is actually to use volta install release-it, which is not a normal global (it automatically uses the project local version if present, see this blog post). A comparable workflow (without volta) would be to use npx release-it since npx will intentionally defer to a project local node_modules/.bin if one is present, which is exactly what my normal volta based setup does as well.

Either way, I totally agree that we don't really want npm install -g release-it / yarn add --global release-it being done. I'm happy to tweak the language in the generated RELEASE.md files to make the npx workflow clearer (and plausibly even the only thing we mention).

[rwjblue]

#9 removed the scripts section, and has a bit more info (though sadly not exact error messages / stack traces):

yarn release (even with publishConfig setting the registry) will think it is not authenticated properly.

[webpro]

Thanks for explaining everything!

So both npx release-it and npm run release strategies work without installing release-it globally. My issue with the description currently is that, by also supporting Yarn, the regular npm users may think they need to install this package globally. So making this more clear in the description would be great indeed. I think everyone is better off by users updating their dependencies (more frequently) :-)

[webpro]

Thanks @rwjblue! I was actually looking at ./RELEASE.md when I opened this ticket, but obviously the template file is what's being used by the script.

[rwjblue]

Ah, good call, I’ll update this repos RELEASE.md as well.