[ANN] dune-release-action: Automate your opam package releases with GitHub Actions

Ecosystem
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Hi everyone :waving_hand:

I’m excited to share a new GitHub Action I’ve been working on: dune-release-action

If you maintain OCaml packages, you know the drill: every release involves a ritual of commands and manual steps. You need to:

  1. Ensure your CHANGES.md is properly formatted
  2. Tag your release
  3. Run dune-release lint + distrib + submit
  4. Create a GitHub release with the correct changelog section
  5. Check the opam-repository’s PR
  6. Oh shit, github token is expired
  7. Create new token without expiration (??)
  8. Retry

For me, was following this guide dune-release.md · GitHub by @anmonteiro, but it typically took around an hour per release.

dune-release-action

dune-release-action automates the entire release workflow in GitHub Actions. Push a git tag, and the action runs dune-release for you with:

  • Handles all the `dune-release` orchestration
  • Validates your changelog format (right tag exists, etc)
  • Creates a GitHub release with proper description (from your changelog section (!!))
  • Submits a PR to opam-repository
name: Release

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - '*'

permissions:
  contents: write
  pull-requests: write

jobs:
  release:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0

      - uses: ocaml/setup-ocaml@v3
        with:
          ocaml-compiler: 5.3.0

      - run: opam install dune-release -y

      - uses: davesnx/dune-release-action@v1
        with:
          package-name: 'your-package'
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GH_TOKEN }}

This is very much a one-day half vibe-coded project and it’s hard to test in many use cases, I’m sure there are edge cases and workflows I haven’t considered.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

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One thing that excites me about this plugin is that it shifts the generation of release archives over to a mechanized action instead of … running on my laptop! I’ve always been a little nervous about the possibility of release archives being trojaned, since they do not normally correspond directly to git archives. Thanks for releasing it!

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