Technically you don't have to with semver, it's just a good practice. From https://semver.org/ https://semver.org/: > A pre-release version MAY be denoted by a

Technically you don't have to with semver, it's just a good practice. From https://semver.org/ https://semver.org/: > A pre-release version MAY be denoted by appending a hyphen and a series of dot separated identifiers immediately following the patch version. Note that it says "MAY" and not "MUST", so it's optional.