Desktop Release Process

Repository maintainer reference for publishing Electron artifacts

This page describes the ChatJS monorepo release process. Scaffolded apps receive the Electron source and Forge configuration, but do not inherit this release automation. For your own app, start with Desktop Distribution.

Release Flow

In the ChatJS monorepo, use Changesets to version npm packages and desktop artifacts. The CLI normally follows a separate manual release process during its alpha period, with the version-specific workflow exception below.

The release flow is:

Add a changeset that includes @chat-js/electron
Let the Changesets workflow open the version PR
Merge that version PR
The npm release workflow publishes the public packages versioned by Changesets. Its Changesets publish command excludes the chat-js CLI during alpha
The desktop artifact workflow reads the new apps/electron/package.json version, builds macOS, Windows, and Linux artifacts, and publishes them to GitHub Releases under the package-scoped tag @chat-js/electron@<version>

This workflow publishes downloadable installers. Its package-scoped tags are skipped by the default updater’s SemVer release filter, so these releases do not provide automatic updates through update.electronjs.org. For your own app, use compatible tags such as v1.2.3 and the platform requirements in Desktop Distribution.

That keeps versioning, changelogs, and release triggering consistent for packages managed by Changesets. The publish destinations are:

Shared public packages publish to npm
@chat-js/electron publishes installers to GitHub Releases

The current release workflow has an explicit bootstrap exception: it publishes @chat-js/registry@0.2.0-beta.3 and chat-js@1.0.0-alpha.2 as a matched pair, skipping versions already on npm. Do not manually publish those versions while that workflow owns their release.

For later CLI alphas not covered by an explicit workflow step, choose the next unused version, update packages/cli/package.json, and run bun install to synchronize the lockfile. Publish the audited prerelease from packages/cli with bun publish --tag alpha and verify that chat-js@alpha resolves to it. Review the current workflow before publishing. The general Changesets publish command does not release CLI alphas.

For a concrete reference, see the workflow used in this repository:

.github/workflows/electron-release.yml

If you scaffold a new app with the Electron option, you get the desktop app code and Forge config, but not this repository’s release automation automatically. Use the workflow above as a starting point if you want the same Changesets-driven versioning flow in your own project.