We have benefited from the magic of pants in a python monorepo, but now I'm trying to work out how to trigger releases with release-please and I'm a bit stuck. tl;dr any docs on how to use release-please with apps in a monorepo where dependencies are not versioned would be very helpful please. The long story We have apps under

src/

and libraries under

libs/

, and 3rd party dependencies under

3rdparty/

using a lockfile. Different apps under src use different libraries, and

pants dependencies src/appname

finds the right dependencies without specifying them manually in the

BUILD

file for the appname.

pants package src/appname

pulls all of this together wonderfully and we get unbloated pex files for each app without any dependencies not used by that app. Wonderful I hear you say - that sounds excellent. And it is. Mostly. We release apps under

src/

using release-please. This works if files are changed in

src/appname

. But if we update a dependency that

src/appname

uses, release-please doesn't know this and doesn't bump the app. We want to avoid versioning and packaging our libraries if we can avoid it, largely to force everything to move in lockstep and not have to maintain multiple libraries. We know this won't scale, but this works for us for now. I have an 😈 solution that I'd prefer to avoid that touches a file in

src/appname

in a workflow and commits it with a

chore(deps)

conventional commit message, but that feels icky so I'm interested in hearing how smarter people than me do this please.

I'm not sure if you can find something automatic, but a simple script/workflow would do the job I think. Assuming that the script is triggered after a merge to main branch, you have to: • lists files changed between HEAD of the main and HEAD~1 • for each app, lists the dependencies (with --transitive) • compare dependencies with changed files; if there is an overlap, you release that app. What we do is we tag the whole repo instead (eg. app-name-vA.B.C) and then have a separate job that detects new tags and packages related app...

Thanks for that ... That's what I was considering as my evil plan. It got a little more complex before it was done because simply triggering release-please didn't see changes so didn't release.

ah, good point; I think you will only see lockfiles changed in version control, so that's impossible to detect 😕

requirements.txt gets updated as well. But everything uses that. So it's a challenge to see which libs changed and update based on them only