Automated releases

[six7]

One annoyance we have with working with the Figma plugin right now is the way we have to do releases. It's all very manual, requiring us to download or build the plugin, and then go to Figma, hit Manage plugins in development and go to Publish a new release for our plugin + enter something in the changelog. This means that even for small hotfixes we have to do all of this manual effort.

Solution

We'd love some automated way of doing this. Whenever we merge to main or when we trigger a certain action using GitHub Actiosn, we'd like the plugin to be released based on the version specified (e.g. when from main build from that and trigger a release). This would mean we get into a habit of releasing often, we'd merge in a hotfix and a new release is deployed.

Possible tools

There's https://github.com/parrot-global/figcd which is supposed to do this, but we've not been able to get that to run successfully.

Definition of done

• We have successfully tested a spike with a dummy plugin (or one of our other ones, ask @six7)
• We have a GitHub Actions script that releases plugins to a certain output
• As a last resort, we could always fall back to a Macbook that sits in the Himalayas and is triggered to release 🤓

[macintoshhelper]

Pros

• Save time for doing releases, less manual work
• We can get into a habit of releasing often, can merge in a hotfix and a new release is deployed.

Cons

• Could break from time to time, as unstable APIs are being depended upon

Blocked By/Depends On

• Need to fork/contribute upstream a fix for authentication to use figcd

Suggested Actions

• Spike with figcd
• Choose the best option:
  • figma-linux + Playwright integration
  • figcd

Amount of Time to Implement: Small/medium – 1-3 days, depending on whether there are blocking issues due to breaking API changes

Resources