Changesets FAQ

Common Questions

A quick list of common questions you might want answered to understand what changesets is doing, without going into minutiae or workflow.

Changesets and their filenames are automatically generated

Changesets are generated by the pnpm changeset command.

Each changeset is its own file

We use random human readable names by default for these files to avoid collisions when generating them, but there's no harm that will come from renaming them.

Changesets are automatically removed

When changeset version or equivalent command is run, all the changeset folders are removed. This is so we only ever use a changeset once. This makes this a very bad place to store any other information.

Note that we don't currently use the version command!

Changesets are markdown files with YAML front matter

The two parts of the file are for different purposes. You should feel free to edit both parts as much as you want.

• The markdown text is a summary of the changes that will be prepended to your changelog when you next run your version command.
• The YAML front matter describes what should be versioned by the version command

Note that we don't currently use the version command!

I want to edit the summary or package bump types - is it safe to do that?

Editing the summary or packages that are affected is safe. You can even write changesets without the command if you want. Note that the change type for our repo is determined by the target branch, so all changesets on a given branch should have the same change type.

Can I manually delete changesets?

You can, but you should be aware this will remove the intent to release communicated by the changeset, and should be done with caution.