Preparing Releases

The prepare step is where changesets become a release. Cursus reads all pending changeset files, determines the next version for each package, and updates everything in one operation.

Running prepare

cursus prepare

Or for specific packages only:

cursus prepare -p my-package -p my-other-package

What happens during prepare

1. Aggregate changesets — all changeset files in .cursus/ are read and grouped by package
2. Determine versions — for each package, the highest change type (major > minor > patch) determines the version bump
3. Propagate dependencies — packages that depend on a bumped package will also be bumped (see configuration)
4. Update version files — Cargo.toml, package.json, lock files, and any workspace references are updated
5. Generate changelogs — CHANGELOG.md entries are created from changeset descriptions
6. Clean up — consumed changeset files are deleted
7. Git operations — depending on your git strategy, changes are committed and optionally pushed or placed on a release branch

Linked versions

For monorepos where packages should share a version number, configure linked versions. When any package in a linked group is bumped, all packages in the group receive the same version.

Dependency propagation

When a package is bumped, its dependents may need a bump too. The dependency_bump setting controls this behaviour:

Value	Behaviour
auto (default)	Propagates major upstream bumps as major; all others as patch
patch / minor / major	Always bump dependents by this fixed level
match	Bump dependents by the same level as the dependency

Git strategies

The [git] configuration controls how prepare interacts with Git:

• push (default) — commits and pushes directly to the current branch
• branch — creates a release branch (e.g., cursus-release/my-package) with a pull request if GitHub integration is enabled

Dry run

Preview what prepare would do without making any changes:

cursus prepare --dry-run