Publish NPM Version

Publish next npm version

Audience

Maintainers of Prisma 8 who have permission to push branches and open PRs in the repository. The skill is invoked locally by the maintainer; it does not run as a GitHub Action. Running locally is what makes the resulting PR trigger CI normally — PRs opened by a workflow's GITHUB_TOKEN do not, which defeats the point of cutting a reviewable release.

Background reading

Read docs/oss/versioning.md before running this skill. It covers:

• The source-of-truth model (root package.json version).
• The lockstep guarantee (every workspace package matches the root).
• The v8 RC line (8.0.0-rc.N, latest frozen until 8.0.0 final).
• The dist-tag convention (latest / dev / beta).
• The full release procedure (this skill covers steps 1-2 of 3; merging the PR is the publish trigger — there is no separate dispatch step).
• The emergency-patch path (this skill does not handle patches).

This SKILL.md covers steps 1-2 — opening the bump PR and driving the release notes. Merging (step 3) stays the human gate.

Pre-flight

The skill does not require the maintainer to be on main or to have a clean working tree — it does all the work in a fresh worktree off origin/main, so the maintainer's current worktree (typically a feature branch in worktrees/<feature>/) is left undisturbed.

Before invoking this skill, confirm:

1. The maintainer can fetch from origin (git fetch origin main succeeds).
2. You are ready to draft the release notes for this bump. The draft-release-notes skill (invoked in step 7 below) enumerates the merged PRs since the previous stable tag and surfaces the release-notes-worthy changes — including any breaking changes — so this no longer rests on the maintainer's unaided recollection. If you already know of an in-flight breaking change that must be called out, note it so the authoring step gives it prominence.

If either precondition is unmet, stop and surface the issue. Do not try to auto-resolve.

Procedure

1. Fetch and determine the target version. Run git fetch origin main, then read the current root version from origin/main. The next version follows the release-bump rules in scripts/determine-version-utils.ts: an RC base advances its counter (8.0.0-rc.1 → 8.0.0-rc.2), a pre-8 stable base transitions onto the RC line (0.17.0 → 8.0.0-rc.1), a stable 8.x base advances the minor.

   git fetch origin main
   CURRENT=$(git show origin/main:package.json | node -e 'process.stdout.write(JSON.parse(require("fs").readFileSync(0,"utf8")).version)')
   NEXT=$(node -e "import('./scripts/determine-version-utils.ts').then(m => process.stdout.write(m.computeNextReleaseVersion(process.argv[1])))" "$CURRENT")
   echo "$CURRENT → $NEXT"
   

   ($NEXT is only for naming the branch and PR — the authoritative bump in step 3 recomputes it inside the fresh origin/main worktree. The command above runs the helper from your checkout, which may be older than origin/main; step 3 therefore ends by verifying the two agree.)

2. Create a fresh worktree off origin/main. Use the convention release/<version> for both the branch and the sibling worktree path:

   git worktree add -b "release/$NEXT" "../release-$NEXT" origin/main
   cd "../release-$NEXT"
   

   This is what makes the skill safe to invoke from any worktree: the bump happens against a fresh checkout of origin/main, not against the maintainer's current branch. The branch name encodes the target version so reviewers can tell at a glance what the PR ships.

3. Bump. From the new worktree, run pnpm bump-version. The script reads the root package.json version from git show HEAD:package.json (in this worktree, HEAD is origin/main), computes the next release version, and writes it to every workspace package.json via scripts/set-version.ts.

   Note: bump-version requires node_modules to resolve its dependencies (e.g. pathe). If the fresh worktree has no node_modules, run pnpm install --frozen-lockfile --ignore-scripts first.

   Then confirm the version it wrote matches $NEXT from step 1. A mismatch means the helper in your original checkout has diverged from origin/main (step 1 ran the local copy); the worktree's value is authoritative — remove the worktree and branch, and restart from step 1 using the value the bump printed.

4. Refresh the lockfile. Workspace-internal dependencies in this repo are pinned as workspace:<version> (not workspace:*), so the bump changes their specifiers in pnpm-lock.yaml. Run:

   pnpm install --lockfile-only
   

   to update pnpm-lock.yaml in lockstep. Without this step, CI fails with ERR_PNPM_OUTDATED_LOCKFILE on the release PR.

5. Sanity-check the diff. Confirm:

   • Every modified file is either a package.json or pnpm-lock.yaml.
   • The package.json diffs are exactly version field changes plus internal workspace:<old> → workspace:<new> specifier bumps (no other fields).
   • The pnpm-lock.yaml diff is exactly specifier: workspace:<old> → workspace:<new> lines (no resolution churn for external packages).

6. Commit. Stage package.json files and pnpm-lock.yaml together in a single commit:

   chore(release): bump to <version>
   

   No body is required — the PR description will explain the bump in detail.

7. Draft the release notes. From inside this release/<version> worktree, run the draft-release-notes skill for <version>. It enumerates the merged PRs since the previous stable v* tag, triages which are user-facing, categorizes them (breaking changes first), writes docs/releases/v<version>.md, and prepends a matching CHANGELOG.md entry — committing both on the release branch as their own commit. Committing the notes here is what lands them in the bump PR diff, so the PR-mode check:release-notes gate passes and the maintainer reviews the notes as part of the release PR.

8. Push the branch to origin.

9. Open the PR with gh pr create. Use the title:

   chore(release): bump to <version>
   

   The body should:

   • State the previous and new version (<previous> → <new>).
   • Link to docs/oss/versioning.md for context.
   • Point reviewers at the committed docs/releases/v<version>.md (authored by the draft-release-notes skill in step 7) as the human-review surface for the release's user-facing changes.
   • Note that merging this PR ships the release: the resulting push to main carries the bumped root version, the Publish to npm workflow detects the change and publishes <new> under dist-tag latest, and a matching GitHub Release (marked pre-release on the RC line) is created automatically.

10. Stop and report the PR URL and the worktree path to the maintainer. The maintainer can git worktree remove ../release-<version> after the PR merges. Do not merge the PR yourself; the merge is a human gate where someone confirms the release notes are acceptable. (Merging triggers the publish — there is no separate dispatch step.)

Idempotency

pnpm bump-version is idempotent because it reads the root version from git show HEAD:package.json rather than from the working tree: running it twice in the same worktree without committing produces the same target version, not a double-bump. The skill as a whole is not — step 2's git worktree add -b "release/$NEXT" … fails if the branch or sibling worktree already exists from an earlier run. To rerun from scratch, remove them first (git worktree remove ../release-$NEXT and git branch -D release/$NEXT), or skip straight to step 3 inside the existing worktree. Do not stack bumps.

Out of scope

• Merging the PR. The skill stops at "PR opened" so a human can confirm the release notes. Merging is what triggers the actual publish, but it remains a human gate by design.
• Patch releases. On the RC line there are none (a fix is just the next rc.N, which this skill handles). For stable-line patches (patch+1), the manual procedure in docs/oss/versioning.md applies.
• Beta tags. The beta dist-tag is hand-cut via a manual workflow_dispatch of Publish to npm; this skill always advances to the next release version.