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Created January 23, 2017 13:09
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Pushing new releases of a legacy version with semantic-release

If you have a package where a lot of people are still using a legacy version of it you might want to keep pushing (security-)fixes to that "branch".

Let's say the "latest" version of your package is "5.4.0", but there is as significant amount of people still using "4.7.4" – the last version you released before doing "5.0.0".

You found a critical bug in "5.4.0" and push it as out as "5.4.1", but it applies to "4.7.4" as well and so you want to do "4.7.5".

Assuming you have semantic-release already set up, you can follow these steps to get that "4.7.5" legacy support release out.

  1. Go to the relevant commit: git checkout v4.7.4
  2. Create a new branch from it: git checkout -b 4.x (You can choose any branch name, just make sure to use the same in step 3)
  3. Add "branch": "4.x" to your package.json's "release" field
  4. Create a new "legacy" dist-tag: npm dist-tag add <your-package>@4.7.4 legacy (You can choose any tag name, except for "latest", just make sure to use the same in step 5)
  5. Add "tag": "legacy" to your 'package.json's "publishConfig" field
  6. Commit this
  7. Commit/cherry-pick the fix
  8. Push the "4.x" branch to GitHub

From now on you can keep the 4.x branch to push future fixes as well.

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