Contributing to Releases

We use changesets to manage version bumps and release notes for our NPM packages and Docker images (ENSIndexer, ENSAdmin, and ENSRainbow).

Adding a Changeset to Your PR

When you open a PR with feature or bug fix changes, you’ll need to include a changeset file that documents your changes:

1. Run changeset or pnpm changeset in the repository root
2. Select the packages/apps your changes affect using the interactive prompt
3. Choose whether your changes are “major” (breaking changes), “minor” (features), or “patch” (bug fixes).
4. Write a clear description of your changes - this will appear in the release notes

The changesets/bot will automatically comment on your PR to either remind you to add a changeset or confirm the version changes that will happen when your PR is merged.

Important notes:

• Changesets are only required for user-facing changes (features, bug fixes)
• You don’t need a changeset for documentation changes or internal refactoring
• All our packages use “fixed” versioning - they all share the same version number regardless of which package triggered the version bump

Upon a New Release

Upon the publishing of a new release, your change will be included in the produced packages/images and your contributions will be referenced in the GitHub Release notes.

Preview Releases

Commits to main automatically publish prerelease package versions with the next dist-tag to NPM. These enable testing of package changes before an official release.

To manually trigger a preview release for a branch that has not been merged to main, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Actions > Release Preview
2. Click “Run workflow” and select the target branch
3. Install preview packages with: npm install @ensnode/package-name@preview-branch-name

Important notes:

• Preview releases are ephemeral and don’t create commits or modify the repository
• No GitHub releases or tags are created for Preview Releases