Snapshot releases are a way to release your changes for testing without updating the versions. Both a modified version and a modified publish command are used to do accomplish a snapshot release. After both processes run, you will have a published version of packages in changesets with a version of 0.0.0-{tag}-DATETIMESTAMP.
Create changesets as normal, as described in adding a changeset. When you are ready to release a snapshot, you should make a dedicated branch for doing so.
yarn changeset version --snapshot
This will apply the changesets, but instead of using the next version, all versions will be set to 0.0.0-THE_TIME_YOU_DID_THIS.
If you want to add a personalised part to this version number, such as bulbasaur, you can run
yarn changeset version --snapshot bulbasaur
This will instead update versions to 0.0.0-bulbasaur-THE_TIME_YOU_DID_THIS
After running the yarn changeset version command, you can use the changeset publish --tag bulbasaur command to releases the packages. By using the --tag flag, you will not add it to the latest flag on npm. This is REALLY IMPORTANT because if you do not include a tag, people installing your package using yarn add your-package-name will install the snapshot version.
You can use the --no-git-tag CLI flag when running changeset publish if you plan to publish snapshot releases locally or you are pushing git tags to a remote from your CI environment.
When you run changeset publish --no-git-tag --snapshot, changesets will skip creating git tags for published snapshot packages. That means that git tags can still be created whenever pushing stable versions (with a regular changeset publish), and you can safely publish snapshot releases locally, without creating unnecessary tags.
When you want to get people to test your snapshots, they can either update their package.json to your newly published version and run an install, or use yarn add your-package-name@YOUR_TAG_OR_VERSIONS
For our above example, you could run
yarn add your-package-name@0.0.0-bulbasaur-THE_TIME_YOU_DID_THIS
or the tag:
yarn add your-package-name@bulbasaur
In almost all circumstances, we recommend that the changes after you have run version get merged back into your main branch. With snapshots, this is not the case. We recommend that you do not push the changes from this running of version to any branch. This is because the snapshot is intended for installation only, not to represent the correct published state of the repo. Save the generated version, and the tag you used, but do not push this to a branch you are planning to merge into the main branch, or merge it into the main branch.