Tag-old-releases NPM

tag-old-releases

Did you forget to tag all your npm releases in git? Yeah me too. This utility tags them retroactively.

Obviously, that's a subjective thing. So use this at your own risk.

Usage

npm install -g tag-old-releases
cd src/my-repo
tag-old-releases

To print git tag commands without actually running them:

npm install -g tag-old-releases
cd src/my-repo
tag-old-releases --dry-run

How it works

tag-old-releases scans through git log of the master branch, checking out each commit as it goes backwards through time. The oldest release in which package.json has a given version is tagged as the release for this version, unless a tag already exists. Tags are named simply x.y.z (version number).

The rationale is that your release process looks like this:

People contribute changes, which get merged over various commits, all of which have the old version number
You decide what the new version number will be when you are actually ready to release, which makes sense for semantic versioning reasons; in that commit you edit your changelog and package.json
That stuff gets merged back to master
You npm publish

If your process differs — for instance if well-meaning contributors bump the version number early and then other critical commits are made before npm publish - then this script will make the wrong choice for those versions. Sorry - best we can do.

A better idea (going forward)

In future, we suggest a script like this in place of npm publish:

#!/usr/bin/env node

var exec = require('child_process').execSync;
var version = require(process.cwd() + '/package.json').version;
exec('git tag ' + version + ' && git push --tags && npm publish');

This will keep you out of trouble by tagging releases at the time you publish.