Auto-generated release PR: develop → master

[AndrewSazonov]

When a package is ready to be released, the first step is to create a pull request from develop to master. This can be done manually:

1. Go to the “Pull requests” tab

2. Click “New pull request”

3. Select the correct branches in the two dropdowns: master ← develop

   • This requires attention to avoid swapping the branches or selecting the wrong one.

4. Click “Create pull request”

5. Add a title

   • This is where I usually open another window and check how the previous release PR was titled, just to keep consistency.

6. Add a description

   • Again, I copy the same text as before, since for this type of PR it normally does not change.

7. Select the correct label

   • This is a slightly tricky part.

   By “correct”, we mean it must not be one of the [scope] labels. The [scope] labels are parsed later to suggest the version bump. Those labels belong to PRs merged from feature → develop.

   The develop → master PR is only for collecting already merged changes into master. It still needs a label, because otherwise the PR-label-check workflow fails. However, it must be a label that:

   • passes the label-check workflow,
   • and does not participate in version bump logic.

   That is why we introduced [bot] pull request.

   If, for example, someone accidentally selects [scope] maintenance, while all feature PRs only had [scope] documentation, then the version bump suggestion would be incorrect (PATCH instead of POST).

8. Click “Create pull request”

All these steps are mechanical and normally identical for every develop → master PR.

Decision

To simplify this process and ensure consistency across all EasyScience repositories, we use a GitHub workflow (added via Copier templates) that automatically creates this release PR.

The workflow can be triggered manually via workflow_dispatch by clicking the “Run workflow” button in the Actions tab. After a single click, the EasyScience bot creates a pull request from develop (or another specified branch) into master, using a predefined title, description, and label.

This replaces the full manual PR creation process with one simple action.

To allow flexibility, the workflow includes an input field “Source branch to create PR from”. By default, this is set to develop, but it can be changed to another branch, such as hotfix, if needed.

The created PR is automatically labeled [bot] pull request, which clearly marks it as automation-generated and excludes it from release notes and version bump logic.

The workflow included in the EasyScience Copier templates can be found here:
https://github.com/easyscience/templates/blob/master/template/.github/workflows/release-pr.yml

---

Links to the original discussions: #50