This document explains the release strategy for artifacts in this organization.
Projects create a new branch when they need to start working on 2 separate versions of the product, with the main
branch being the furthermost release.
OpenSearch typically tracks 3 releases in parallel. For example, given the last major release of 1.0, OpenSearch in this organization maintains the following active branches.
- main: The next major release, currently 2.0. This is the branch where all merges take place, and code moves fast.
- 1.x: The next minor release, currently 1.1. Once a change is merged into
main
, decide whether to backport it to1.x
. - 1.0: The current release, currently 1.0. In between minor releases, only hotfixes (e.g. security) are backported to
1.0
. The next release out of this branch will be 1.0.1.
Label PRs with the next major version label (e.g. 2.0.0
) and merge changes into main
. Label PRs that you believe need to be backported as 1.x
and 1.0
. Backport PRs by checking out the versioned branch, cherry-pick changes and open a PR against each target backport branch.
Plugins, such as job-scheduler aren't as active as OpenSearch, and typically track 2 releases in parallel instead of 3. This still translates into 3 branches. For example, given the last major release of 1.0, job-scheduler maintains the following.
- main: The next release, currently 1.1. This is the branch where all merges take place, and code moves fast.
- 1.x: A common parent branch for the series of 1.x releases. This is where 1.x patches will be made when
main
becomes 2.0. - 1.0: The current release, currently 1.0. This branch's parent is
1.x
to make future merges easier. 'In between minor releases, only hotfixes (e.g. security) are backported to1.0
. The next release out of this branch will be 1.0.1.
Do not creating branches in the upstream repo, use your fork, for the exception of long lasting feature branches that require active collaboration from multiple developers. Name feature branches feature/<thing>
. Once the work is merged to main
, please make sure to delete the feature branch.
OpenSearch versioning follows semver.
The build number of the engine is 3-digit major.minor.patch
(e.g. 1.1.0
), while plugins use 4 digits (1.1.0.45
). See OpenSearch#1093 for a proposal to remove this difference.
Versions are incremented as soon as development starts on a given version to avoid confusion. In the examples above versions are as follows.
- OpenSearch:
main
= 2.0.0,1.x
= 1.1.0, and1.0
= 1.0.0 - job-scheduler:
main
= 1.1.0.0,1.0
= 1.0.0.0
Create tags after a release that match the version number, major.minor.patch
, without a v
prefix.
For a discussion on whether to add a prefixing v
to release tags, see #35.
Repositories create consistent release labels, such as v1.0.0
, v1.1.0
and v2.0.0
, as well as patch
and backport
. Use release labels to target an issue or a PR for a given release. See MAINTAINERS for more information on triaging issues.
The OpenSearch release process is centralized.
- Two candidate bundle builds for OpenSearch and OpenSearch Dashboards, produced by bundle-workflow, are chosen as release candidates. Those artifacts have successful end-to-end integration, backwards-compatibility and performance tests, and are signed.
- Staged maven artifacts are promoted to Maven Central.
- Bundles and -min artifacts are published to opensearch.org.
This project follows semantic versioning. Backwards-incompatible changes always result in a new major version and will never be backported. Small improvements and features will be backported to a new minor version (e.g. 1.1
). Security fixes will be backported to a new patch version (e.g. 1.0.1
).
Here are the commands we typically run to backport changes to release branches:
- Checkout the target release branch and pull the latest changes from
upstream
. In the examples below, our target release branch is1.x
.
git checkout 1.x
git pull upstream 1.x
- Create a local branch for the backport. A convenient naming convention is backport-[PR-id]-[target-release-branch].
git checkout -b backport-pr-xyz-1.x
- Cherry-pick the commit to backport. Remember to include DCO signoff.
git cherry-pick <commit-id> -s
- Push the local branch to your fork.
git push origin backport-pr-xyz-1.x
- Create a pull request for the change.