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Installation

Local installation

For Node modules projects we recommend installing semantic-release locally and running the semantic-release command with npx:
npm install --save-dev semantic-release
Then in the CI environment:
npx semantic-release
Note: npx is a tool bundled with npm@>=5.2.0. It is used to conveniently find the semantic-release binary and to execute it. See What is npx for more details.

Global installation

For other type of projects we recommend installing semantic-release directly in the CI environment, also with npx:
npx semantic-release

Notes

  1. 1.
    If you've globally installed semantic-release then we recommend that you set the major semantic-release version to install. For example, by using npx semantic-release@18. This way you control which major version of semantic-release is used by your build, and thus avoid breaking the build when there's a new major version of semantic-release. This also means you, or a bot, must upgrade semantic-release when a new major version is released.
  2. 2.
    Pinning semantic-release to an exact version makes your releases even more deterministic. But pinning also means you, or a bot, must update to newer versions of semantic-release more often.
  3. 3.
    You can use Renovate's regex manager to get automatic updates for semantic-release in either of the above scenarios. Put this in your Renovate configuration file:
    {
    "regexManagers": [
    {
    "description": "Update semantic-release version used by npx",
    "fileMatch": ["^\\.github/workflows/[^/]+\\.ya?ml$"],
    "matchStrings": ["\\srun: npx semantic-release@(?<currentValue>.*?)\\s"],
    "datasourceTemplate": "npm",
    "depNameTemplate": "semantic-release"
    }
    ]
    }
  4. 4.
    npx is a tool bundled with npm@>=5.2.0. You can use it to install (and run) the semantic-release binary. See What is npx for more details.