How to release only affected changes?

[ThePlenkov]

Hi, in nx we have two features:

• nx release to manage releases
• nx affected to run tasks only for changes affected by PR

Unfortunately I was not able to find out how those two features are connected. What I've noticed is that currently nx release bumps a new version for every component, While what I'd like to achieve is something like nx affected release Do you think is possible? Thank you!

As a workaround I tried the script like:

nx release patch --skip-publish -p $(nx show projects --affected -t nx-release-publish --sep=,)

but in case if there are no changes - it patches every package in this case unfortunately.

[ThePlenkov]

A good reply from @JamesHenry #27749 (comment)

Affected as a mechanism would only say that a project is affected within a particular commit range.

You could use this to infer what needs to be released, but it wouldn't say what the new version should be. That's why we have different options for determining the new version: imperatively via the CLI, conventional commits, and version plans.

Conventional commits and version plans already determine what is "affected" based on the semver bump data that is encoded within them.

We could potentially explore what an affected imperative versioning would look like, but again, it's a question of what the bump should be. Some projects could be "affected" but want a patch, whereas others want a minor release.

Having only publishing be combined with affected is also problematic, because again, affected refers to a project being impacted by git changes, which is not necessarily related to the desire to publish, because the artifact you are publishing is usually mostly outside (entirely in some cases, like the Nx repo where we version and publish from dist and use the registry as the source of truth for versioning).

Nx release needs to generically support a large number of different approaches, so we can't just add things without considering the ripple effect for all use-cases.