This guide is strongly based on the Prometheus release instructions.
We use Semantic Versioning.
We maintain a separate branch for each minor release, named release-<major>.<minor>
, e.g. release-1.1
, release-2.0
. The stable
branch is supposed to point to the latest stable release.
The usual flow is to merge new features and changes into the master branch and to merge bug fixes into the latest release branch. Bug fixes are then merged into master from the latest release branch. The master branch should always contain all commits from the latest release branch.
If a bug fix got accidentally merged into master, cherry-pick commits have to be created in the latest release branch, which then have to be merged back into master. Try to avoid that situation.
Maintaining the release branches for older minor releases happens on a best effort basis.
For a patch release, work in the branch of the minor release you want to patch.
For a new major or minor release, create the corresponding release branch based on the master branch.
Bump the version in the VERSION
file in the root of the repository. Once the version, a number of files have to be re-generated, this is automated with the following make target:
$ make generate
Now that all version information has been updated, an entry for the new version can be added to the CHANGELOG.md
file.
Entries in the CHANGELOG.md
are meant to be in this order:
[CHANGE]
[FEATURE]
[ENHANCEMENT]
[BUGFIX]
Create a PR for the version and changelog changes to be reviewed.
Once the PR for the new release has been merged, make sure there is a release branch for the respective release. For new minor releases create the release-<major>.<minor>
branch, for patch releases, merge the master branch into the existing release branch. Should the release be a patch release for an older minor release, cherry-pick the respective changes.
Push the new or updated release branch to the upstream repository.
Tag the new release with a tag named v<major>.<minor>.<patch>
, e.g. v2.1.3
. Note the v
prefix.
You can do the tagging on the commandline:
$ git tag -s vx.y.z -m 'vx.y.z'
$ git push --tags
Signed tag with a GPG key is appreciated, but in case you can't add a GPG key to your Github account using the following procedure, you can replace the -s
flag by -a
flag of the git tag
command to only annotate the tag without signing.
Finally build the container image.
$ make container TAG=vx.y.z
And then push the container image.
$ docker push quay.io/coreos/prometheus-operator:vx.y.z
Take a breath. You're done releasing.