Releasing Ruby Gems with OIDC and GitHub Actions

The traditional approach for automating Ruby gem releases is to use release-gem. It’s super simple. You can also build upon it when you need something beyond the plain rake release, such as updating a CHANGELOG.md, by rolling miles of brittle GitHub Actions YAML and shell script AI slop. Instead, I’ve been asking AI to follow a hand-crafted RELEASING.md. It can run tests, date CHANGELOG.md, ask me for a RubyGems OTP, make the release, increment the version of the next developer iteration. This works well. Still, AI is a very blunt tool for something that should be mechanized. Therefore, I built ruby-gem-release to automate all release bookkeeping in Ruby in an extensible workflow. The release runs in GitHub Actions. RubyGems Trusted Publishing supplies short-lived credentials, so there is no RubyGems API key to store in GitHub secrets or share with other maintainers. After setup, collaborators with write access can dispatch releases too. As an example, I added it to ruby-link-checker.…

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