Plain-English Explanation: release-tag

When you push a new version tag to GitHub (like v1.0.0 or v2.1.0-beta), this tool automatically creates a GitHub Release for you. Instead of manually going to your repository's Releases page and filling out a form each time, the action runs automatically in the background and handles it.

The key difference from similar tools is how it handles pre-releases. Normally, you'd have to manually check a box to mark a release as a "pre-release" (meaning it's not the stable version your users should download). This tool is smart: it looks at your tag name and automatically figures it out. If your tag contains a dash followed by a letter — like v1.0.0-alpha, v2.0.0-rc1, or v3.1.0-beta.2 — it marks the release as a pre-release. If it's just v1.0.0, it treats it as a stable release. No configuration needed.

You'd use this in your GitHub workflow by adding it as a step that runs whenever someone pushes a tag. Developers on a team could then just create a version tag in their code, push it, and boom — a new release page appears on GitHub automatically. This is especially useful for open-source projects or any team that cuts releases frequently. Instead of one person having to babysit the release process, it happens instantly.

The tool is a modified version of GitHub's official create-release action, with just this one smart addition about detecting pre-releases from tag names. It saves a small amount of repetitive work on every release, which adds up over time.