creating a draft release

is it possible to create a draft only release?

that is, run the whole process, but keep the release labelled as “draft” in github (otherwise referred to as “pre-release” in GitHub’s UI and not to be confused with semantic-release’s prerelease flag on branches)

I looked through issues and examples in this repo and there was no such example, the only reference to “draft” was in-line and doesn’t seem to be specifically flaggable …

to further distinguish from workflow with prerelease flag, I intend to continue using a single main branch and not looking to implement the workflows as described rather, just make the final github release flagged as “draft” upon publishing.

[ahmadnassri]

to state in another lens: while semantic-release can and should be opinionated on the semantic versioning workflow, I believe additional choices on how the “release” (in GitHub’s terminology, and GH entity named “release”) should be left to the user …

e.g. draft=true and/or prerelease=true on the Release Entity …

expectation is be able to use semantic-release with GitHub releases and still tag every tag in GitHub as prerelease / draft if I choose to, regardless of the versioning schema exposes for numbering (-rc, -beta, or none at all)

the real-world-use-case I’m attempting to enable at the moment:

• one main branch, locked
• PRs for changes into main branch
• merged PRs will create a “GitHub Release”, flagged as “prerelease=true”
• CI (GitHub Actions) triggers on release.created with type = prereleased:

  on:
    release:
      types: [prereleased]
  

  CI publishes version to new environment [version].domain.tld
• human process follows, QA, etc … when ready, human can change the state of the GitHub Release to uncheck the prerelease flag
• CI triggers on n release.created with type = released:

  on:
    release:
      types: [released]
  

  CI promotes this version to production

[BetaHuhn]

I am trying to integrate semantic-release with electron-builder and was also looking for this option. My goal is to have semantic-release create a draft release and then electron-builder will upload the artifacts to that release. Once everything is done the release will be published.

This seems like a simple thing to add as most of the code is already there. I would be willing to create a PR for this which implements a draft option like @skn-bot mentioned.