Automate GitLab Releases
Nx Release can automate the creation of GitLab releases for you. GitLab releases are a great way to communicate the changes in your projects to your users.
In order to be able to create the release on GitLab, you need to provide a valid token which can be used for authenticating with the GitLab API.
Nx release supports two main ways of doing this:
- In all environments it will preferentially check for an environment variable (the environment variable can either be called
GITLAB_TOKENorGL_TOKEN). - In GitLab CI it will check for and use the automatically created GitLab token in the
CI_JOB_TOKENenvironment variable.
GitLab Release Contents
When a GitLab release is created, it will include the changelog that Nx Release generates with entries based on the changes since the last release. Nx Release will parse the feat and fix type commits according to the Conventional Commits specification and sort them into appropriate sections of the changelog.
Enable Release Creation
To enable GitLab release creation for your workspace, set release.changelog.workspaceChangelog.createRelease to 'gitlab' in nx.json:
1{
2 "release": {
3 "changelog": {
4 "workspaceChangelog": {
5 "createRelease": "gitlab"
6 }
7 }
8 }
9}
10Preview the Release
Use nx release --dry-run to preview the GitLab release instead of creating it. This allows you to see what the release will look like without pushing anything to GitLab.
Disable File Creation
Since GitLab releases contain the changelog, you may wish to disable the generation and management of the local CHANGELOG.md file. To do this, set release.changelog.workspaceChangelog.file to false in nx.json:
1{
2 "release": {
3 "changelog": {
4 "workspaceChangelog": {
5 "file": false,
6 "createRelease": "gitlab"
7 }
8 }
9 }
10}
11Note: When configured this way, Nx Release will not delete existing changelog files, just ignore them.
Project Level Changelogs
Nx Release supports creating GitLab releases for project level changelogs as well. This is particularly useful when releasing projects independently. To enable this, set release.changelog.projectChangelogs.createRelease to 'gitlab' in nx.json:
1{
2 "release": {
3 "changelog": {
4 "projectChangelogs": {
5 "createRelease": "gitlab"
6 }
7 }
8 }
9}
10Nx Release does not support creating GitLab releases for both project level changelogs and the workspace changelog. You will need to choose one or the other.
Customizing the GitLab instance
If you are not using gitlab.com, and are instead using a self-hosted GitLab instance, you can use a configuration object instead of the string for "createRelease" to provide the relevant hostname, and optionally override the API base URL, although this is not typically needed as it will default to https://${hostname}/api/v4.
1{
2 "release": {
3 "changelog": {
4 "workspaceChangelog": {
5 "createRelease": {
6 "provider": "gitlab",
7 "hostname": "gitlab.example.com"
8 }
9 }
10 }
11 }
12}
13