posterous-sbt is a plugin for simple-build-tool that automates publishing release notes to any Posterous site, but especially implicit.ly. It transforms notes from Markdown to HTML using Knockoff, and posts them using Dispatch.
To use this plugin with an sbt project, declare it as a dependency in a file under project/plugins. Since posterous-sbt uses itself as a plugin, it has a file posterous-sbt/project/plugins/Plugins.scala with:
import sbt._
class Plugins(info: ProjectInfo) extends PluginDefinition(info) {
val t_repo = "t_repo" at "http://tristanhunt.com:8081/content/groups/public/"
val posterous = "net.databinder" % "posterous-sbt" % "0.1.4"
}
You can use this in conjunction with other plugins, just add them as dependencies to the same file.
Release notes for your project are expected under a notes/ directory in the root of the project that mixes in the posterous.Publish trait. In this directory, notes for a particular version are named <version>.markdown while an optional short description about the project can be placed in about.markdown. For example, in posterous-sbt you'll find the following:
posterous-sbt/
notes/
0.1.0.markdown
0.1.1.markdown
about.markdown
When publishing and previewing, the description from about.markdown is appended to the selected version's release notes as boilerplate.
If you're publishing to the Scala software announcement site implicit.ly, please keep in mind that the post's title will be the name of your project and its corresponding version: these should not be repeated as a heading in the notes. It is best to lead with copy describing the big changes in your release, or jump right into a list of those changes. For major releases with changes divided into sections, use an h3 (a line prefixed by ### in Markdown) or smaller heading. The short description about.markdown should be one or two sentences long, with a link to more information about your project.
To preview the transformed release notes, run the preview-notes action in sbt. This can be followed by a version number, e.g. preview-notes 1.0.1; the default is the current version with any "-SNAPSHOT" suffix removed. If you're on a 1.6+ JVM, the notes should open in your default browser. The location of the file they've been saved to is displayed in the sbt output.
This plugin comes preconfigured to publish to implicit.ly. To be added as a contributor to implicit.ly, send me a message on github containing your email address and a link to your Scala project if it isn't on github. If you'd like to publish to a different Posterous site, just override the postSiteId method in your project definition.
You'll need to create a login on Posterous if you haven't done that yet. Then, specify it in the file ~/.posterous:
[email protected]
password=mypassword
Once you've done that, you can check your setup with the check-posterous action. This will fetch your list of authorized sites from Posterous and confirm that the project's current postSiteId is one of those.
Once you've previewed your source notes and checked your publishing authorization, you're ready to post to the web. Like the preview-notes action, publish-notes defaults to the current non-snapshot version which you can override by following the command with a version number.
If the release notes publication is successful, the shortened published URL is displayed and will open in the default broswer on 1.6+ JVMs. Hello, world!
