sbt plugin for fully automated releases, without SNAPSHOT and git sha's in the version. You can easily create e.g. daily or weekly releases, or even release every single commit on your main branch. A remix of sbt-ci-release and sbt-release-early with a spin.

• automatically tags and releases the next version, no manual tagging required
• can be used in scheduled release jobs (no duplicate releases if there haven't been any changes)
• for both maven central and custom repositories (e.g. jenkins/artifactory/nexus etc)
• verifies that your build does not depend on any snapshot dependencies to prevent problems early on

projects/plugins.sbt:

addSbtPlugin("io.shiftleft" % "sbt-ci-release-early" % "<version>")

• Tasks
• Setup for a custom repository (e.g. jfrog artifactory)
• Setup for Sonatype / Maven central
• Dependencies
• FAQ
• Alternatives

• ciReleaseSkipIfAlreadyReleased: check if your current HEAD commit already has a version tag, and in that case skip the other ciRelease* tasks below. Useful e.g. for daily builds.
• ciReleaseTagNextVersion: determine the next version (by finding the highest version and incrementing the last digit), then create a tag with that version and push it
• ciRelease: publish to the configured repository
• ciReleaseSonatype: publish to Sonatype (using a patched version of sbt-sonatype)

In your build.sbt do not define the version setting, and configure your repository in the publishTo setting:

ThisBuild/publishTo := Some("releases" at "https://shiftleft.jfrog.io/shiftleft/libs-release-local")

In your release pipeline run:

sbt ciReleaseSkipIfAlreadyReleased ciReleaseTagNextVersion ciRelease

Sonatype central (which syncs to maven central) imposes additional constraints on the published artifacts, so the setup becomes a little more involved. These steps assume you're using github actions, but it'd be similar on other build servers.

If you don't have a Sonatype account yet, follow the instructions in https://central.sonatype.org/pages/ossrh-guide.html to create one.

In your build.sbt do not define the version setting and ensure the following settings are configured:

• name
• organization: must match your Sonatype account
• licenses
• developers
• scmInfo
• homepage
• publishTo := sonatypePublishToBundle.value

Example: https://github.com/mpollmeier/sbt-ci-release-early-usage/blob/master/build.sbt For a multi-project build, you can define those settings in your root build.sbt and prefix them with ThisBuild/, e.g. ThisBuild/publishTo := sonatypePublishToBundle.value

echo '/gnupg-*' >> .gitignore

Sonatype requires all artifacts to be signed. Since it doesn't matter which key it's signed with, and we need to share the private key with the build server (e.g. github actions), we will simply create a new one specifically for this project:

gpg --gen-key

• For real name, use "$PROJECT_NAME bot", e.g. sbt-ci-release-early bot
• For email, use your own email address
• Passphrase: leave empty, i.e. no passphrase. It will warn you that it's not a good idea, but this is just a pro forma key for Sonatype. You'll only share the key with github, and if it had a passphrase you'd have to share that with github as well, anyway. Private key passphrases gave me a lot of headaches across different gpg versions, so I decided to advise against them. If you like you can encrypt your private key, e.g. with gpg or openssl.

At the end you'll see output like this

pub   rsa2048 2018-06-10 [SC] [expires: 2022-11-13]
      $LONG_ID
uid                      $PROJECT_NAME bot <$EMAIL>

Take note of $LONG_ID, make sure to replace this ID from the code examples below. The ID will look something like 499FD7755EC30DDAF43089355E00EC8C822C6A2A.

export LONG_ID=499FD7755EC30DDAF43089355E00EC8C822C6A2A

Optional: if you would like to make the key never expire:

gpg --edit-key $LONG_ID
expire #follow prompt
key 1
expire #follow prompt
save

Now submit the public key to a keyserver (shouldn't matter which one, keyservers synchronize their keys with each other):

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --send-keys $LONG_ID

So that Github Actions can release on your behalf, we need to share some secrets via environment variables with github actions. You can either do that for your project or an entire organization.

First you need to obtain a Sonatype username/password token:

• log into https://oss.sonatype.org
• select Profile from the dropdown at the top right
• User Token -> Access -> Access user token

Now go to your github project or organization and navigate to Settings -> Secrets and variables -> Actions and add the following Repository secrets:

• SONATYPE_USERNAME: the name part of the user token you generated in the previous step
• SONATYPE_PASSWORD: the password part of the user token you generated in the previous step
• PGP_SECRET: The base64 encoded secret of your private key that you can export from the command line like here below

# macOS
gpg --armor --export-secret-keys $LONG_ID | base64 | pbcopy
# Ubuntu (assuming GNU base64)
gpg --armor --export-secret-keys $LONG_ID | base64 -w0 | xclip
# Arch
gpg --armor --export-secret-keys $LONG_ID | base64 | sed -z 's;\n;;g' | xclip -selection clipboard -i
# FreeBSD (assuming BSD base64)
gpg --armor --export-secret-keys $LONG_ID | base64 | xclip
# Windows
gpg --armor --export-secret-keys %LONG_ID% | openssl base64

Your secrets settings should look like this:

The final step is to configure your github actions workflow. There's many ways to do this, but most builds can probably take the below setup as is. It configures two workflows: one for pull requests which only runs the tests, and one for master builds, which also releases a new version. Both are configured with a cache to avoid downloading all your dependencies for every build.

<project_root>/.github/workflows/pr.yml

name: pr
on: pull_request
jobs:
  pr:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          fetch-depth: 1
      - name: Setup JDK
        uses: actions/setup-java@v4
        with:
          distribution: temurin
          java-version: 21
          cache: sbt
      - uses: sbt/setup-sbt@v1
      - run: sbt +test

<project_root>/.github/workflows/release.yml

name: release
concurrency: release
on:
  push:
    branches: [master, main]
    tags: ["*"]
jobs:
  release:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - name: Setup JDK
        uses: actions/setup-java@v4
        with:
          distribution: temurin
          java-version: 21
          cache: sbt
      - uses: sbt/setup-sbt@v1
      - run: sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y gnupg
      - run: echo $PGP_SECRET | base64 --decode | gpg --batch --import
        env:
          PGP_SECRET: ${{ secrets.PGP_SECRET }}
      - run: sbt +test ciReleaseSkipIfAlreadyReleased ciReleaseTagNextVersion ciReleaseSonatype
        env:
          SONATYPE_PASSWORD: ${{ secrets.SONATYPE_PASSWORD }}
          SONATYPE_USERNAME: ${{ secrets.SONATYPE_USERNAME }}

That's all. Here's a demo repo: https://github.com/mpollmeier/sbt-ci-release-early-usage

By installing sbt-ci-release-early the following sbt plugins are also brought in:

• sbt-dynver: sets the project version based on the git tag
• sbt-pgp: signs the artifacts before publishing
• sbt-sonatype: publishes your artifacts to Sonatype

Other than manually looking at Sonatype/Maven central or git tags, you can use the following snippet that remotely gets the git tags that start with v and have (in this version) three decimals separated by ., and returns the highest version.

git ls-remote --tags $REPO | awk -F"/" '{print $3}' | grep '^v[0-9]*\.[0-9]*\.[0-9]*' | grep -v {} | sort --version-sort | tail -n1

When a build is e.g. interrupted, or didn't satisfy the Sonatype requirements for publishing, it is likely that these artifacts are still lying around in the Sonatype staging area. You can log into https://oss.sonatype.org/ and clean it up, or just do it from within sbt, locally on your machine:

• sonatypeStagingRepositoryProfiles // lists staging repo ids
• sonatypeDrop [id]

SNAPSHOT dependencies have major downsides:

• are mutable, i.e. your builds aren't reproducible
• slow down your build, because sbt has to check for updates all the time
• involve multiple layers of caches, which tend to break and add complexity if you try to debug a problem

To keep things simple I decided to not add that feature to this plugin. If you want to release a specific version you have to do that yourself:

// in sbt:
set version := "1.2.3"
+publishSigned
sonatypeBundleRelease

// on the terminal:
git tag v1.2.3
git push origin v1.2.3

Note to future self: this would have added complexity because to trigger it we would rely on git tags, and we need a foolproof way to check if a given tag has already been released. My intial thought was to tag anything released with _released_1.0.1_, but it was getting quite complicated for handling an edge case.

Add the following to the project settings:

publish/skip := true

If the build defines a dependency on the subproject (e.g. dependsOn(subProjectName)) then it's automatically included in the release. Otherwise you can just append subProjectName/publish to your build pipeline, the version is already set for you :)

As soon as Sonatype "closes" the staging repository they become available on Sonatype/releases and will be synchronized to maven central within ~10mins. If you want to use them immediately, add a Sonatype resolver to the build that uses the released artifact:

resolvers += Resolver.sonatypeRepo("releases")

Yes. This plugin is published with a previous version of itself :)

There exist great alternatives to sbt-ci-release-early that may work better for your setup.

• sbt-ci-release: The most popular release plugin I believe. Main difference: releases versions that you previously tagged in git (rather than automatically tagging every build). This plugin is essentially a fork of sbt-ci-release, they share most traits.
• sbt-release-early:
• sbt-rig