philoserf/skills/release-obsidian-plugin

Release (Obsidian Plugin)

Final step in the release pipeline. Assumes pre-release-obsidian-plugin has already passed and the target version has been decided. This skill handles version bumping, tagging, and publishing.

Prerequisites

Before starting, confirm:

• pre-release-obsidian-plugin passed with no FAIL status
• Working tree is clean and on main
• CHANGELOG.md has a section for the target version
• The target version is not already tagged (git tag -l <version>)

If any prerequisite is unclear, ask rather than proceeding.

Workflow

Phase 1: Version Bump

The target version comes from the user (decided during pre-release). Bump by updating package.json version and running the version script, which propagates to manifest.json and versions.json:

npm version <version> --no-git-tag-version

This sets package.json version, then triggers the version script (bun run version-bump.ts), which reads npm_package_version and updates manifest.json and versions.json.

Verify all three files agree:

jq -r '.version' package.json
jq -r '.version' manifest.json
jq -r 'keys[-1]' versions.json

If they don't match, stop and surface the discrepancy.

Phase 2: Commit and Tag

Stage the version files and commit, then create an annotated tag. Tags use bare version numbers (no v prefix):

git add package.json manifest.json versions.json
git commit -m "release: <version>"
git tag -a <version> -m "Release <version>"

Confirm with the user before pushing.

Phase 3: Push

Push the commit and tag together:

git push origin main
git push origin <version>

The tag push triggers the GitHub Actions release workflow, which builds the plugin and creates a GitHub release with main.js and manifest.json as assets.

Phase 4: Update Release Notes

Wait for the release workflow to complete:

gh run list --branch main --limit 1 --json status,conclusion,name

Check once, wait ~30 seconds if still running, check again. If the workflow fails, report the failure and stop.

Once the release exists, extract the changelog section for this version — everything between ## <version> and the next ## heading — and update the GitHub release:

gh release edit <version> --notes "$(cat <<'EOF'
<extracted changelog content>
EOF
)"

Phase 5: Verify

Confirm the release is live and report:

gh release view <version> --json tagName,name,body,assets

Output

Release: <version>
====================
Version bump:  package.json, manifest.json, versions.json
Commit:        <short sha> release: <version>
Tag:           <version>
GitHub release: <url>
Assets:        main.js, manifest.json
Release notes: Updated from CHANGELOG.md

Do not use when

• Project is not an Obsidian plugin — use language-native release tooling
• Pre-tag validation hasn't run — use pre-release-obsidian-plugin first
• Just committing staged changes without tagging — use vc-ship