Consider automating releases with semantic-release

[darylwright]

• I'm submitting a ...
  [ ] bug report
  [ * ] feature request
  [ * ] question about the decisions made in the repository
  [ ] question about how to use this project

• Summary

  • There is a deprecation notice on the standard-version GitHub page, thus it probably should no longer be used for hledger-parser releases.
  • Releases don't appear to be automated, which makes the project less responsive to new features or defects.
  • I'm partial to semantic-release since I have the most experience with it, but the standard-version documentation recommends release-please. I'd recommend semantic-release over release-please for the following reasons:
    • Automated package releases to NPM
    • Doesn't require tool specific keywords to perform releases (just use Convential Commits as per normal)
    • Inline configuration in the package.json file
    • Relatively simple to use and configure
    • Doesn't require a dependency in package.json, can be called via npx during CI/CD
  • Further automating releases will enable the process of building, testing, packaging, and deploying to be initiated with a simple commit to main, no manual intervention necessary (unless specifically desired)
  • Additionally, I also recommend creating GitHub releases so that the current version, changelog documentation, and source assets are visible and easily accessible from the repo page

• Other information (e.g. detailed explanation, stack traces, related issues, suggestions how to fix, links for us to have context, eg. StackOverflow, personal fork, etc.)

  • semantic-release documentation
  • release-please repo

[jonestristand]

This is a good idea, I will start converting

[darylwright]

If you're thinking about switching to GitHub Actions to build and release, I'll shamelessly plug one of my examples with package.json configuration. I haven't used CircleCI, so I can't be of much help there until I get a chance to play around with it.