Release trailer

The trailer is optional. putitoutthere already knows how to release on its own: if a commit changed a file inside a package's paths, that package cascades and ships at patch. The trailer exists to override that default — bump minor/major, skip a release entirely, or scope a bump to specific packages.

If you just want "patch whenever something changes," you don't need to write a trailer at all. Nightly cron workflows lean on this — see the nightly release recipe.

Grammar

release: <bump> [pkg1, pkg2, ...]

• <bump> is one of: patch, minor, major, skip.
• [...] is an optional list of package names to scope the bump to.
• Package names must match ^[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9._-]*$ (the same character set npm, crates.io, and PyPI accept). Spaces, slashes, and leading hyphens are rejected.
• The line is matched anywhere in the commit body and tolerates leading whitespace, so trailers indented inside a fenced code block or quoted reply still count. If a commit has multiple release: lines, the last one wins — handy for amending an earlier hint without rewriting history.

Semantics

Trailer	What happens
none	Every cascaded package releases at patch.
release: minor	Every cascaded package releases at minor.
release: major	Every cascaded package releases at major.
release: skip	No release this merge. Cascade ignored.
release: minor [a, b]	a and b bump minor. Other cascaded packages bump patch. Unlisted-and-uncascaded packages are force-included into the plan at the listed bump.

Examples

Feature work on the crate:

feat: add parser

release: minor

Breaking change in one package only; unrelated package still patched:

refactor: rework python API

release: major [my-py]

Docs-only change that shouldn't release anything:

docs: fix typo

release: skip