Groups

beachball supports different ways of grouping packages together or limiting the packages considered.

• Version groups allow bumping packages together.
• Grouped changelogs allow grouping changelog entries for multiple packages into a single file.

You can also use scoping to limit which packages are considered, either for a specific operation or at all.

Version groups

By default, all packages in the repository are only bumped based on the changes specified in their own change files (or if their in-repo dependencies are bumped and bumpDeps is enabled). Developers are expected to create change files specifying the bump type for each package as they go.

For cases where it's necessary to bump packages together, beachball also provides a concept of version groups. Whenever one package in a group is bumped, the versions of all packages in the group will be updated with the same bump type.

Note: this is slightly different from lock step versioning (where all packages use the exact same version): beachball only applies the same bump type to each package's current version. There's an open feature request discussing full lock step versioning.

Note: a package cannot belong to multiple groups - beachball will not allow its commands to work with that configuration

Configuring version groups

Groups can be added to the configuration file. See the VersionGroupOptions source for full details.

Name	Type	Description
name	string	Name of the version group
include	string | string[] | true	glob pattern(s) for package paths to include (see notes on globs). If true, include all packages except those matching exclude.
exclude	string | string[]	glob pattern(s) for package paths to exclude (see notes on globs). This currently must use negated patterns only (will be fixed in version 3).
disallowedChangeTypes	ChangeType[] | null	Disallow these change types for the group.

Example:

{
  "groups": [
    {
      "name": "group name",
      "include": ["packages/groupfoo/*"],
      "exclude": ["!packages/groupfoo/bar"],
      "disallowedChangeTypes": ["major"]
    }
  ]
}

Note that if you want grouped changelogs for your version groups, this must be configured separately as explained below.

If you only want to publish or record changes for certain packages, you should use scoping instead.

Grouped changelogs

To show changes for multiple packages in one change file, use the changelog.groups option. See the ChangelogGroupOptions source for full details.

Name	Type	Description
masterPackageName	string	The main package which a group of changes bubbles up to.
include	string | string[] | true	glob pattern(s) for package paths to include (see notes on globs). If true, include all packages except those matching exclude.
exclude	string | string[]	glob pattern(s) for package paths to exclude (see notes on globs). This currently must use negated patterns only (will be fixed in version 3).
changelogPath	string	Put the grouped changelog file under this directory. Can be relative to the root, or absolute.

In this example, changelogs for all packages under packages/* (except packages/baz) are written to a CHANGELOG.md at the repo root (.), with foo as the master package. (To replace foo's usual changelog with a grouped one, you'd specify changelogPath as the path to foo instead, e.g. packages/foo.)

{
  "changelog": {
    "groups": [
      {
        "masterPackageName": "foo",
        "changelogPath": ".",
        "include": ["packages/*"],
        "exclude": ["!packages/baz"]
      }
    ]
  }
}

The result looks something like this:

# Change Log - foo

## 1.1.0

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 08:03:08 GMT

### Minor changes

- `foo`
  - some change (example@example.com)
  - other change (example@example.com)
- `bar`
  - bar change (example@example.com)