Consider using npm distribution channels for early access releases

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Currently it is difficult for users to test changes on main without a published module. We often go months without a release, which can make it hard for users to keep up with changes as they are happening.

See: https://github.com/cloudevents/sdk-javascript/issues/385#issuecomment-786376145

Describe the solution you would like to see Use npm distribution channels to provide early access to the module as, for example, cloudevents@canary. This would also entail modifying our publishing process via release-please, or some other defined process to determine how and when to publish a module. If this is to be automated, there is an unfortunate side effect in that we will need to provide npm publishing credentials to the repository config.

Additional context npm distribution channels: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v7/commands/npm-dist-tag some background: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v7/commands/npm-dist-tag

[PSanetra]

Just as a hint to tooling: I have written a cli tool that also supports prerelease counters: https://github.com/PSanetra/git-semver#examples-1 The next version is calculated based on previous git tags and recent conventional commits.

[lholmquist]

+1 to using the canary tag.

I know npm now has the “automation tokens” that can be enabled, https://github.blog/changelog/2020-10-02-npm-automation-tokens/, but haven’t used them yet.

I guess in my mind, we would publish to the canary tag after every merge(automated with some action), but would still want release-please to create a PR for the “next real release” which we would merge manually when it is time for a releae like we are currently doing