I think it’s possible to accomplish with colons instead of brackets, i.e. rake bump:pre:alpha.

There are a few edge cases to consider, e.g.:

» rake bump:current
Current version: 1.2.3
» rake bump:alpha
Bump version 1.2.3 to 1.2.3-alpha1
» rake bump:beta
Bump version 1.2.3-alpha1 to 1.2.3-beta1
» rake bump:alpha
… what now?

It's also worth noting that 1.2.3-alpha is not an increase from 1.2.3.

Really, in order to go from a non-pre release to a pre-release, one would need to know the eventual non-pre target. ie, if current is 1.2.3, pre-major would be 2.0.0-alpha, pre-minor would be 1.3.0-alpha, and pre-patch would be 1.2.4-alpha.

Perhaps bump:pre:major, bump:pre:minor, bump:pre:patch to derive the correct increment for the prerelease. (Probably defaulting to pre:major?)

And then bump:pre:alpha, bump:pre:beta, bump:pre:rc to increment the counter when already on a prerelease?

I'd also recommend that the pre-counter be dot-separated, as semver describes the pre-release version:

a series of dot separated identifiers immediately following the patch version

So 1.2.3-alpha.0 and 1.2.3-rc.4

Hey, I've added PR that adds new prerelease bumps here #81.

Regarding applying the prerelease label to the final version (e.g. 1.2.3 => 1.2.3-alpha) I propose following workflow.

➜ bump major --no-commit
# Bump from 1.2.3 to 2.0.0
➜ bump alpha
# Commits to git
# Bump from 2.0.0 to 2.0.0-alpha

It might be worth following patterns that other version bumping tools follow:

npm has premajor, preminor, and prepatch which does the bumping of the relevant major/minor/patch bit as well as the prerelease bit all at once, so that multiple steps aren't necessary: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/version. (That's part of my inspiration for bump:pre:major, et. al.)

Hi guys, I found this gem very useful, but you need to add the alpha, beta and rc bumps.
I thing the @mckomo PR could work.

bump is for "idk what version I'm on, but this is a patch"
so having to say ":alpha/:beta/:rc" means the user knows what the current state is (can't do beta after rc etc)
so simple solution would be to bump:set 🤷

• if we add alpha/beta/rc then they should have .1 suffix to follow semver
• I'd prefer to hide them and :pre from -T to not spam a projects rake tasks with it
• ideally get rid of pre since it's unintuitive no matter what way it's implemented
• bump:set could be interactive and say hey it's 1.2.3-alpha.5 now, what do you want to set it to, to make it intuitive and open