Advanced Configuration

Git submodules

If your repository uses git submodules, set the submodules option in the actions/checkout step:

• submodules: true to checkout submodules.
• submodules: recursive to recursively checkout submodules.

For example:

steps:
  - name: Checkout repository
    uses: actions/checkout@v4
    with:
      fetch-depth: 0
      submodules: recursive

To learn more, see GitHub docs.

Add more info to commit message

By default, the commit message of the release PR only contains chore: release. To add the PR title and description to the default commit message when merging a pull request, change the GitHub repository settings under "General":

You can learn more in the announcement and docs.

Add additional checks before releasing

To release your crates, Release-plz runs cargo publish, which checks if your code compile before publishing to the cargo registry.

If you want to run other checks before releasing (e.g. cargo test), you have two options:

1. (preferred) Add the checks in other GitHub actions and run them in the Pull Requests. Only merge a PR if the checks are successful. The pro of this approach, is that release-plz and your checks run in parallel.

2. Add the checks to the GitHub action before running release-plz:

   jobs:
     release-plz:
       name: Release-plz release
       runs-on: ubuntu-latest
       concurrency:
         group: release-plz-${{ github.ref }}
         cancel-in-progress: false
       steps:
         - name: Checkout repository
           uses: actions/checkout@v4
           with:
             fetch-depth: 0
         - name: Install Rust toolchain
           uses: dtolnay/rust-toolchain@stable
         - run: cargo test # <-- put any check you like here
         - name: Run release-plz
           uses: MarcoIeni/release-plz-action@v0.5
           with:
             command: release
           env:
             GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
             CARGO_REGISTRY_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.CARGO_REGISTRY_TOKEN }}

   The con of this approach is that the release-plz action will complete later because it needs to wait for the other checks to finish.

Close old release PRs

Release-plz updates the release PR by force-pushing to it. If you want release-plz to open new release PRs instead of updating the old ones, you can close the old release PR before running release-plz:

jobs:
  release-plz:
    name: Release-plz
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    concurrency:
      group: release-plz-${{ github.ref }}
      cancel-in-progress: false
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - name: Install Rust toolchain
        uses: dtolnay/rust-toolchain@stable
      - name: Close old release PR
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        run: |
          # List all opened PRs which head branch starts with "release-plz-"
          release_pr=$(gh pr list --state='open' --json number,headRefName --jq '.[] | select(.headRefName | startswith("release-plz-")) | .number')
          # Close the release PR if there is one
          if [[ -n "$release_pr" ]]; then
            echo "Closing old release PR $release_pr"
            gh pr close $release_pr
          else
            echo "No open release PR"
          fi
      - name: Run release-plz PR
        uses: MarcoIeni/release-plz-action@v0.5
        with:
          command: release-pr
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          CARGO_REGISTRY_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.CARGO_REGISTRY_TOKEN }}

Run on schedule

The quickstart guide configures release-plz to run every time you merge a commit to the main branch.

To run release-plz periodically, you can use the schedule event:

# Trigger the workflow every Monday.
on:
  schedule:
    # * is a special character in YAML so you have to quote this string
    - cron:  '0 0 * * MON'