What is build-and-tag-action?

When you build a custom GitHub Action using JavaScript, you typically end up with a project that uses multiple files and dependencies. To make that Action ready for others to use, GitHub's official documentation recommends committing all of those bundled files directly into your repository. The build-and-tag-action project automates away that tedious step. Whenever you publish a new release, it automatically compiles your code into a single, ready-to-use file and attaches it to that release. Here is how it works in practice. When you publish a release on GitHub, this tool looks at your project's configuration to find your main file. It takes your compiled code and your action's settings file, then pushes them directly to the release tag. It also creates or updates a simplified major version tag. So, if you release version 1.0.0, it updates a "v1" tag to point to it. This allows other people to use your Action by just referencing "v1," and they will automatically get any minor updates or fixes you push later. This tool is built for developers who create and share their own GitHub Actions. Normally, keeping versions organized and ensuring the right files are bundled means doing repetitive manual work or keeping cluttered files in your repository. With this tool, a developer can write their code using modern tools like TypeScript, run a build process, and let the automation handle the packaging and tagging. Notably, this project was created to fix specific friction points in GitHub's recommended workflow. Instead of keeping a messy folder full of dependencies in your repository, this approach relies on a tool called ncc to bundle everything into one clean file. The project itself is essentially a combination of two existing tools, one that handles the compiling and one that handles the tagging, brought together to create a single, seamless publishing step.