Automated Releases: Conventional Commits, SemVer and release-please to Version Without Guessing

A practical guide to deriving the version, the changelog and the publish step from your commit messages: the Conventional Commits specification, what SemVer actually promises, validation with commitlint, husky and the PR title in CI, release-please with its manifest and release PR, publishing gated on release_created, monorepos, the mistakes that leave the pipeline silent (squash merge without validation, tokens that do not trigger workflows, breaking changes without "!"), alternatives such as semantic-release and Changesets, an adoption plan and a checklist. With code in YAML, JSON, JavaScript and shell.

14 minutes read

Josue Puig

2026-10-17

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