release-it is a production-grade CLI tool that automates the entire software release lifecycle: determining the next semantic version, bumping manifests (package.json via npm version), staging/committing/tagging/pushing to git, publishing to npm (including staged publishing queues, OTP flows, custom registries, and pnpm/bun publishers), and creating GitHub or GitLab releases with changelogs and binary assets. It is distributed as an npm package with a bin entry point (bin/release-it.js) and is used by major projects including Axios, jQuery, Redux, Swagger, and n8n. In production it operates as a shell-out orchestrator rather than a library-first tool — it drives git and npm CLI commands directly and talks to GitHub via Octokit and GitLab via undici fetch against their v4 REST API.