Automate releases

[getzze]

Several things could be done to ease the process of making a new release:

• protect the main branch and review the github actions to ensure the linter and tests pass before a release.
• use pre-commit.ci to automatically fix linter and formatting problems Add pre-commit hook #1075 (comment)
• show a coverage report on coverage failure
• automatic building of changelog (using towncrier like attrs ?)

[wujekbogdan]

Have you considered Python Semantic Release? It's inspired by the great semantic-release tool for JS.

[getzze]

I didn't know it, thanks. I looked at the documentation and I found it quite confusing. From what I understood it uses commit messages to decide of the next version? But does it automate the release on Github?

At the moment I'm thinking of a solution based on setuptools_scm and python scripts to do that.

[wujekbogdan]

You're getting it right. The idea is that the tool determines the version number based on commit messages. It's often implemented in such a way that you squash-merge a PR and use its commit message as a source of truth.

Then you use that information as input for a GitHub Action that updates the GitHub tag and performs the actual release. See: https://python-semantic-release.readthedocs.io/en/latest/automatic-releases/github-actions.html