Changesets

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Snapshot Releases ​

Snapshot releases are a way to release your changes for testing without updating the versions. Both a modified version and a modified publish commands are used to do a snapshot release. After both commands run, you will have a published version of packages in changesets with a version like 0.0.0-{tag}-{datetime}.

Starting Off ​

Create changesets as normal. When you are ready to release a snapshot, create a dedicated branch for doing so.

Versioning ​

bash
$ pnpm changeset version --snapshot
bash
$ npx @changesets/cli version --snapshot
bash
$ yarn changeset version --snapshot

This will apply the changesets, but instead of using the next version, all versions will be set to 0.0.0-{datetime}.

If you want to add a personalized part to this version number, such as bulbasaur, you can run:

bash
$ pnpm changeset version --snapshot bulbasaur
bash
$ npx @changesets/cli version --snapshot bulbasaur
bash
$ yarn changeset version --snapshot bulbasaur

This will instead update versions to 0.0.0-bulbasaur-{datetime}.

Publishing ​

Run publish --tag bulbasaur to publish the packages. By using the --tag flag, you will not add it to the latest dist-tag on npm.

If you did not set a name when running version --snapshot, you should still use --tag to not publish it to the latest dist-tag. Use a random name like publish --tag snapshot.

Always use a tag for snapshots

This is REALLY IMPORTANT because if you do not include a tag, installing your package will default to the snapshot version, which is not what you want.

Disabling git tags ​

When publishing snapshot releases, you may not want to create git tags as they may be temporary only. Use publish --no-git-tag to skip creating git tags for snapshot releases.

Using a snapshot version ​

When you want to get people to test your snapshots, they can either update their package.json to your newly published version and run an install, or use the install command directly:

bash
$ pnpm add your-package-name@0.0.0-bulbasaur-{datetime}
bash
$ npm install your-package-name@0.0.0-bulbasaur-{datetime}
bash
$ yarn add your-package-name@0.0.0-bulbasaur-{datetime}

Or you can install with the dist-tag:

bash
$ pnpm add your-package-name@bulbasaur
bash
$ npm install your-package-name@bulbasaur
bash
$ yarn add your-package-name@bulbasaur

What to do with the snapshot branch ​

In almost all circumstances, we recommend that the changes after you have run version get merged back into your main branch. With snapshots, this is not the case. We recommend that you do not push the changes from this running of version to any branch. This is because the snapshot is intended for installation only, not to represent the correct published state of the repo. Save the generated version, and the tag you used, but do not push this to a branch you are planning to merge into the main branch, or merge it into the main branch.