Lerna publish with no git commit, tag or push

To lerna publish without a git commit or attempting to git push, use --no-push --no-git-tag-version, like so:

lerna publish --no-push --no-git-tag-version

For official documentation on these options see the lerna version docs.

To understand the specifics of --no-push, --no-git-tag and why these options are documented in lerna version, read on.

Why are we using lerna version options?

The 2 options we’re passing: --no-push and --no-git-tag, come from the lerna version command.

The lerna publish docs mention that it supports all the options of lerna version, “lerna publish supports all of the options provided by lerna version […]”.

However these version options don’t doesn’t get printed in lerna publish --help.

Next we’ll delve deeper into the options.

no-push

--no-push is quite self-explanatory from the lerna version docs:

By default, lerna version will push the committed and tagged changes to the configured git remote. Pass --no-push to disable this behavior.

no-git-tag-version

By default, lerna version will commit changes to package.json files and tag the release. Pass --no-git-tag-version to disable the behavior.

This option is analogous to the npm version option --git-tag-version, just inverted.

lerna version command docs

The name --no-git-tag-version is somewhat misleading since it doesn’t mention git commits. Digging further, since the docs mention the npm config - git-tag-version, we can check how that works: “Tag the commit when using the npm version command. Setting this to false results in no commit being made at all.” (emphasis my own).

So --no-git-tag-version does what we need, it stops both a git commit and git tag being generated, although the name is not intuitive.

Prior art

There’s an existing post with the same approach as here: Lerna Publish to NPM Without a Git Commit.

I skimmed skim through it, but it didn’t make lerna publish --no-push --no-git-tag-version click for me. It definitely does explain that lerna publish --no-push --no-git-tag-version should be used though.