Skip version bump when not using conventional commit message about gh-action-bump-version

[thekevinscott]

I think the formatting of the if statement may have changed; in my shared workflow definition, I had to format the if statement like:

    if: ${{ ! startsWith(github.event.head_commit.message, '[skip-version]') }}

Just in case anyone else stumbles along here!

[nickbeaulieu]

Yes, it's true that running the action always bumps the version. If not specified it will increment the patch version.

You could create an if condition for the workflow (or even just the Bump package version step). For example, to base the condition on having a certain string in the commit message you can use a condition like this.

jobs:
  version-bump:
    if: "startsWith(github.event.head_commit.message, 'VERSION BUMP:')"

If you more frequently wish to bump the version than not bump the version, you could invert the condition to prevent it.

jobs:
  version-bump:
    if: "!startsWith(github.event.head_commit.message, 'NO BUMP:')"

These conditions are just examples.

As a real world example, our workflow creates an rc version bump by default, not a patch. To achieve that we used the following settings.

...
with:
  # These words need to be part of a commit to trigger
  # They are purposefully complex to avoid accidental triggers
  major-wording: 'major-bb-protected'
  minor-wording: 'minor-bb-protected'
  patch-wording: 'patch-bb-protected'
  # needs to be empty for all pushes to be prerelease
  rc-wording: ''

  # defaulting to bump prerelease version--default is patch
  default: prerelease
  preid: 'rc'

  tag-prefix: 'v'

  target-branch: 'main'
  commit-message: 'CI: bumps version to {{version}}'

[a-Leong]

Another option is to include [ci skip] in the commit message, from Github Docs. Note that this will skip all action workflows that would otherwise be triggered by the commit.