Releases on this project are triggered through GitHub Actions listening for differences between our main and develop branches. A pull request for the next release is created by a github-actions bot and merging this pull request automatically delivers the changes up to production.
A release pull request (PR) is created anytime something new is merged to develop that has not yet been merged to main. To execute a release and kickoff the CI process:
- Find the automated PR that was created by github-actions.
- It will always have a "Release: v#.#.#" title.
- Copy the list from the "changelog" comment
- Edit the description of the release PR
- Paste in the list of changes and distribute each item accordingly to the Improvements and Technical sections
- Update
CHANGELOG.mdas part of the release PR:- Copy the whole "Unreleased" section and paste above it
- Replace the lower "Unreleased" title with the version in the release PR
- In the top unreleased section remove all references from each of the five lists (reset it to be blank)
- In the section covering this release's changes, remove any of the sections that have no PRs referenced (e.g. if "Removed" has no PRs in it, you can remove that section title)
- At the very bottom there is a list of the versions.
- Copy the top version list line and paste it at the top of the same list
- Change the numbers to now reflect this change
- Merge the PR to main
- This will kick off a continuous
Once more PRs are merged to develop a new Release PR will be created automatically. We will never have to write a release PR from scratch.
Besides the version changelog that is automatically created as releases are executed, we also keep a CHANGELOG.md that is updated with each pull request that is merged to develop to help keep track of what changes are made.
The changelog itself links to documentation describing the format. The essential form is a list of PR titles and links to those PRs organized by what release they go with and what category of change they are making.