disperse

disperse is a simple script that I use to create releases for some of the free software packages I maintain. It's meant to streamline the releasing process, reducing the human effort involved in creating a release as well as the likelihood of a brown-bag release.

It can do one or more of the following:

• check if CI is currently passing (for supported platforms, like GitHub)
• derive the intended new version by checking existing releases and version strings specified in project files
• update NEWS files with the release date
• make sure various files contain the correct version string
• verify that the testsuite runs successfully
• optionally only create a release if there were no changes to the repository in the last X days (useful for running in a cronjob)
• upload to a repository site:
  • pypi, if the project is a Python project
  • crates.io, if the project is a rust project
• create a git tag for the new release
• create "release" entries (on supported platforms, like GitHub)

Disperse was previously known as "releaser".

Configuration

To a large extent, disperse will automatically figure out what needs to happen. It can discover the projects you maintain on pypi by reading ~/.pypirc for your username and enumerating them.

It can parse and modify setup.py and Cargo.toml files.

It uses a configuration file (disperse.conf) for anything that can not be autodetected, and which lives in the repository root.

For example:

   tag_format: "dulwich-%(release)s"
   news_path: "NEWS"

Basic usage

disperse has various subcommands. The core ones are:

• release - create a new release for project in $CWD or at a specific URL
• discover - find projects that the current user owns (e.g. on pypi) and release them if they have unreleased changes and are significant enough
• validate - validate the disperse configuration

Running from docker

The easiest way to run disperse is to use the docker image at ghcr.io/jelmer/disperse. You'll need to make sure that appropriate SSH and PGP keys are available.

The author regularly runs disperse inside of a Kubernetes cronjob.

Future

In the future, I would like it to:

• support more languages than just python and rust