base-template

A base template for CI/CD workflows with MkDocs and Semantic Release

Usage

Create a new repository

Click the Use this template button
Enter a name for your repository
Click Create repository from template

Add secrets for GitHub Actions

Go to the Settings tab of your repository
Click Secrets in the left sidebar
Click New repository secret
Add the following secrets:

Name	Value
GITHUB_TOKEN	`${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}`
NPM_TOKEN	`${{ secrets.NPM_TOKEN }}`

Initial release

Push a commit to the main branch with the message feat: initial commit

GitHub Pages

Modify the contents of the mkdocs.yaml file
Add content to the docs folder
Push a commit to the main branch
Wait for the Publish docs via GitHub Pages workflow to complete
Go to the Settings tab of your repository
Scroll down to the pages section
Select Deploy from a branch as the source
Select gh-pages as the branch and /(root) as the folder, then click Save

Features

[x] Linting
[x] Automated Release Draft
[x] Semantic versioning
[x] Documentation to PDF
[x] Github Pages deployment (MkDocs)

Workflows

CI (Continuous Integration)

Lint

The Lint workflow is automatically triggered whenever there is push activity in main or pull request activity towards main. It has one job:

Lint the codebase with GitHub's Super-Linter.

CD (Continuous Deployment)

Docs to PDF

The Docs to PDF workflow is automatically triggered whenever there is push activity in main or pull request activity towards main. It has one job:

Build the documentation to PDF with Markdown to PDF

Release

The Release workflow is automatically triggered whenever there is push activity in main or pull request activity towards main. It has one job:

Create a release draft with semantic-release

Publish docs via GitHub Pages

The Publish docs via GitHub Pages workflow is automatically triggered whenever there is push activity in main or pull request activity towards main. It has one job:

Publish the documentation to GitHub Pages with MkDocs

Semantic Release

Commit message format

semantic-release uses the commit messages to determine the consumer impact of changes in the codebase. Following formalized conventions for commit messages, semantic-release automatically determines the next semantic version number, generates a changelog and publishes the release.

By default, semantic-release uses Angular Commit Message Conventions. The commit message format can be changed with the preset or config options of the @semantic-release/commit-analyzer and @semantic-release/release-notes-generator plugins.

Tools such as commitizen or commitlint can be used to help contributors and enforce valid commit messages.

The table below shows which commit message gets you which release type when semantic-release runs (using the default configuration):

Commit message	Release type
`fix(pencil): stop graphite breaking when too much pressure applied`	~~Patch~~ Fix Release
`feat(pencil): add 'graphiteWidth' option`	~~Minor~~ Feature Release
`perf(pencil): remove graphiteWidth option` `BREAKING CHANGE: The graphiteWidth option has been removed.` `The default graphite width of 10mm is always used for performance reasons.`	~~Major~~ Breaking Release (Note that the `BREAKING CHANGE:` token must be in the footer of the commit)

Automation with CI

semantic-release is meant to be executed on the CI environment after every successful build on the release branch. This way no human is directly involved in the release process and the releases are guaranteed to be unromantic and unsentimental.

Triggering a release

For each new commit added to one of the release branches (for example: main, next, beta), with git push or by merging a pull request or merging from another branch, a CI build is triggered and runs the semantic-release command to make a release if there are codebase changes since the last release that affect the package functionalities.