Tramline now has an approvals system that allows you to add high-level approvals from various stakeholders for the release.
During a release, the release captain can add tasks to be approved by any set of members in the team. When a task is assigned to a team member, they receive an email notification.
The assignees of the task can mark the task as approved, blocked, or in-progress. The release cannot be sent to the production track on the stores until all the approvals are complete.
The release captain can choose to override the approvals for a release. This is useful for rare scenarios where there is an urgency in getting the release to production and the team members are unavailable for the required approvals.
If the override is used, it will be reflected on the release activity page for auditing purposes.
The configuration to enable approvals for the release can be found in the Advanced Settings of the release.
You can now edit the roles of your team members in the team section of the Organization Settings page.
The owners and developers in the team can edit the roles of the developers and viewers, respectively.
This is especially useful for teams with SSO enabled. With SSO, any member of your organization can log in to Tramline as a viewer. You can choose to change the role of the user to the most appropriate one once they have joined your team in Tramline.
You can now re-use the same integration for multiple categories. This reduces the number of connections required for onboarding a new app.
Improvements and Fixes
- Enhance FAD build upload check to search by build number and version name
- Auto-detect file extension for build archive files when not provided
- Send branch context to Bitbucket when triggering pipeline for commit
- Ensure submissions get picked up in the correct order
- Set the app time zone correctly on the live release pages
- Fix default production submission config for Android
- Fix resume action for app store rollout
- Handle a phased rollout on the App Store when it's already complete
- Pick active locales only from the production track for Play Store
- Fix "changes since previous" to handle unapplied commits
- Add missing locale string for rollout getting updated
- Add a warning to show until which release step the notes can be edited
- Fix health metric jobs to stop fetching after the monitoring period
Tramline is conceptually a relatively rare paradigm of DevTools. Other "release management" DevTools on the server-side like Heroku can operate more or less solely through a CLI. For most teams, Tramline is a high-touch tool where a lot of people end up collaborating. It is as much a GitHub as it is a Heroku.
This is why a more-than-default thoughtful design is necessary for Tramline. It is important so that people can get used to the "right flow" for releasing apps.
From this lens, we've made two broad changes.
- Porting our design over to the "work pane"
- Simplifying the building blocks for configuring a release
The work pane is auto-structured into four main sections:
Overview: Issue tracking, changeset tracking and the homepage for the Release Captain.
Stability: Internal builds, Release Candidates, testing.
Metadata: Dedicated space for updating notes, store metadata and screenshots.
Store Release: Managing reviews and rolling out to production.
Previously, the work pane was one giant page, and even though there's some value in everything in one single page; it is a nightmare of information architecture and page load times. More specifically, categorizing them allows us to clearly differentiate historical state, present state and future state across different events.
Because the design allows for more breathing room, we can focus on individual aspects of the release a bit better.
For example, there's a lot more control around app submission. You can cancel a running review in progress and you can also replace the build for an existing review with a new one or a previous valid one.
Similarly when rolling out, the entire page doesn't get filled with a lot of rollout data, there's a dedicated place for it:
The tabs are alive — they always track the current state of that section — whether it's in progress, completed or pending. They also automatically get switched over to the most important tab in the current release and they disappear if they aren't necessary to the current release.
We have now thrown away all the bloated abstractionware of Steps and Deployments and instead we just deal with Submissions. The interface to configure them is a single pane to setup everything about your release and will continue to grow down this path.
Trying to be clever with our release abstractions and modeling them after CI/CD pipelines was a mistake. We now model things around actual user patterns.
We now also support updating multiple languages for the release notes. When you start your release we pick up your last updated release notes, which you can edit before release.
On top of this, we also support updating multiple languages for both iOS and Android (for cross-platform apps) from the same place!
Slack was previously available as a submission integration so that you could send builds to a channel. This is still supported, but as a part of the notification configuration itself.
We've been wanting to make this change for a bit because it makes the purpose of each category very clear. Integrations that distribute should be integrations where the primary purpose is to distribute, it's not enough that they can optionally help distribute. Slack is foremost a team chat tool, and file server later.
This is only applicable to new apps, existing apps with Slack as a submission integration will be gracefully ported over.
Late last year, we added support for adding multiple bundle identifiers within a single primary app under App Variants. This helps support flavors of the same app being distributed to different submission channels. We've gone a step further, and allow configuring a different account/integration altogether rather than just using the existing primary app integrations.
:::note
App Variants still only support Firebase App Distribution at the moment. We will be adding more integrations in the future.
:::
Improvements and Fixes
- Ensure all API-call based user actions are async
- Fix UI issue around showing 100% rollout correctly for non-staged rollouts
- Ensure there are valid build workflows available before allowing train creation
- Fix the password reveal toggle in the signup form
- Show a generic flash message instead of a full 500 page
- GitHub release notes are now well formatted and respect automatic notes
- Dockerize the entire dev setup
We now support Bitbucket both as a VCS and a build server integration. As with other integration categories, Bitbucket falls neatly in our abstractions but with two primary exceptions.
First, Bitbucket doesn't allow us to pull builds from pipelines directly. You can upload them to the Downloads section for your repo via the upload-file pipe. We will soon release a custom pipe that wraps this and makes setting everything up even simpler.
Second, Bitbucket doesn't provide us a way to cherry-pick commits (either manually or automatically) from the API, so continous backmerges are currently turned off for this integration. We'll push an update as soon as we have a way around this.
That's it! The rest works precisely as Tramline is meant to work.
-
If you're an SSO-enabled org, you now don't need to invite viewer users, all SSO users can self-join automatically as viewers. For write-enabled (developer) users, you would still need to go through the invite flow as usual.
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Until now, you could have both email-based authN and SAML-based authN working together. Now, if you're an SSO-enabled org, no other auth mechanism is allowed.
Improvements and Fixes
- Improve integration/config onboarding wizard
- Add a banner to prompt users to complete their profile
- Handle new Play Store errors – foreground services and account issues
- Handle unauthorized errors from App Store properly
- Allow internal testing releases when app is in draft mode
- Allow hotfix for a cross-platform app when one platform has started rollout
- Akshay Gupta (@kitallis)
- Nivedita Priyadarshini (@nid90)
- Prabhanshu Gupta (@prabhanshuguptagit)
SSO (via SAML) is now available as an authentication method in Tramline. Once enabled, all users in the organization will be required to sign in using the SSO provider.
To simplify the setup and management of SSO, we use a third-party auth service provider. However, we continue to maintain our existing email/password login natively, i.e, without relying on any third-party dependencies. This allows open-source users to self-host Tramline without the need for setting up additional accounts outside.
With this, the user access management to Tramline can be centrally managed by companies and their IT teams. This is a big step for Tramline towards supporting enterprise organizations!
We rolled out Reldex to all users in our last major release. We have since added a few more optional components to the Reldex score:
The number of days since the last release to production was made. This is a good indicator of how much you are sticking to your regular release cadence. This is an indirect measure of drops in your deployment frequency.
Tramline classifies changes in the following ways:
- Stability changes: changes on the release branch during the testing phase
- Patch fixes: changes after the rollout to production has started
- Hotfixes: special releases made after the rollout to production has completed
This component now takes the "Patch fixes" into account separately, along with Stability changes and Hotfixes.
You can now configure your release train to only bump the patch version across new releases. This is especially helpful for daily/weekly scheduled releases, where you don't want too many minor version bumps constantly as each subsequent change is likely trivial.
The upcoming release feature is now available for release trains that directly ship to beta/production (without any internal builds). This allows you to prepare the next release while the current one is still in progress. This is especially useful for teams that have a long beta period and want to get a head start on the next release.
Improvements and Fixes
- Add Indian+Indonesian languages to list of locales for release notes
- Gracefully handle lack of apps in iOS or Android projects on Firebase
- Handle double-quotes inside build notes when distributing
We are excited to introduce Reldex, a new metric and scoring mechanism that helps you understand the efficacy of your release process.
It combines various signals like release duration, hotfixes, time taken to rollout, and fixes during stabilization to give you a single score (between 0 and 1) that represents an overall quality of the delivery process.
This is different from the post-release monitoring of the health of a release based on signals from APM and monitoring tools. Reldex measures everything before or during delivery, rather than the stuff after the release has been rolled out.
Reldex is enabled by default and available to all users, both free and paid. You should already be seeing this score show up on your dashboard. It comes pre-configured with some sensible defaults, but you can fine-tune it based on how you want to weigh and prioritize the importance of each of the signals. Read more about Reldex → here.
Tramline currently halts the scheduling of an automatic train if the last release failed, but was not explicitly stopped. This is a safety mechanism to prevent a series of failures.
With the new option of Automatic stop on failure under scheduled releases, Tramline will automatically stop a failed release so that a new one can be scheduled and kicked off. This is useful when you're confident that the failure was a one-off and/or you don't want to handhold scheduled releases.
When generating automatic commit-based tester notes, we now only consider the first parent when encountering a merge commit. Since Tramline doesn't actually checkout code, we manually simulate git log [range] --first-parent to get the correct set of commits needed to generate the appropriate notes.
Improvements and Fixes
- Auto-populate release notes from previous release for a new release
- Add a note about Slack file upload requiring Tramline to be invited to channel
- Ensure that GitHub integration exists with a mandatory
installation_id - Show the last 15 releases on the team page instead of 10
- Add checks for duplicate-actions for all phased rollout related triggers
We have introduced release health definitions to the Tramline release workflow. You can now configure multiple rules to monitor the health of your release as it gets rolled out to users.
Choose from a set of available health metrics and set thresholds for their healthiness per your own release quality benchmarks and historical data.
Once you define what makes your release healthy, Tramline will continuously monitor the health status of your release and notify you as it changes so you can take immediate action.
You can make an informed decision to halt the current rollout or resume it as your release health changes. In the future, we will automate the halt and acceleration of the rollout based on these rules.
Read more on how to configure these rules in the docs.
When a new build is available to download from Tramline, we now attach the build to the Slack notification where it can be directly downloaded for testing or other purposes.
In the user settings page, users can set the team they belong to in an organization, add/update their GitHub login so their work is correctly attributed for a release, and change their name as well as their preferred name.
When your Apple review gets rejected, Tramline now continues to poll and sync the status of the store version to ensure that the release dashboard shows the changes in review status happening outside of Tramline due to resubmission of the same build or messages back and forth with the review team.
Improvements and Fixes
- Add missing help texts to all charts
- Reduce the load time of the notification settings page
- More frequent scheduling of scheduled releases
- Add better CTA on stats cards on the release overview page
- Remove hotfixes from DevOps charts where they show up as anomalies
- Allow some more valid special characters in release notes
- Wider layout and design elements consistency and improvements
Over the past few months, we've been steadily improving our user experience and we've now rolled out a new version of our interface to all users 🚀
Tramline is an interaction-heavy, information-dense, multi-stakeholder system with entirely novel abstractions. Keeping that in mind, our decisions, in summary, were guided by the following principles:
- A design system with as few foundational components as possible
- Minimal navigational overhead containing users into only two "work" related pages
- Well-defined color palette, but with judicious use of colors
- Consistent typography, iconography, borders and spaces
- Configuration forms serving both as inputs and information guides
- Tabs with lazy loaded content wherever multi-page navigation is required
- Liberal use of modals for smaller forms, and infrequent interactions
- Smaller font sizes and denser layouts, with liberal use of tooltips for explanations
For the last year or so, our UI has been accretive, organic, repetitive and as a result: all over the place. This is an attempt to take a step back, collect all the feedback and visually reorganize Tramline from the ground up.
Tramline previously, to now.Tramline's engineering is just a couple of folks (just one for the first half!), so we were able to go a long way without a proper system in place. But since a lot of our engineering principles have reached solid state, we felt the design needed to do the same so that we can continue to ship really fast.
The new system hasn't taken over the entire application yet, but we are planning to ship all of it in the next couple of months.
Stay tuned for an in-depth post on our blog where we'll dive into the details!
All builds or versions making their way to the store are prominently featured on the new releases page (formerly known as the Train page). These store versions are now accompanied by a "diff" button, allowing one to easily compare the changes between the current build and the previous build sent to the store within the same release.
Sometimes bug fixes during a rollout are unavoidable, and when it does happen, it's helpful to know precisely what changed between them. This changeset of course also naturally ties your changes (commits) with the specific teams, if teams are configured.
We've added a small dynamic widget that displays both the recent history and upcoming runtime of a scheduled release train. This view adapts according to the schedule set. Think of it as a compact, calendar-style glance into the scheduling status and an indication of when the next release is scheduled to occur.
This has been a long while coming, but now you can disconnect integrations! It's historically been a low priority for two reasons:
- Once connected, you seldom need to change your core integrations
- Changing an integration should not destroy historical release information and state connected to the previous integration
We built a simple internal versioning system for our release related data which now enables us to disconnect and reconnect integration without disturbing any prior state.
In the future, we can port over a similar idea to allow changing distribution channels and step re-ordering as well.
Improvements and Fixes
- Allow selecting a color when creating a new team
- On the team page, show the inviter for a user
- Identify the
tramline[bot]in the Team Analysis charts and remove other bots - Allow configuring the release stages for the Bugsnag integration
- Fix the order of versions in the charts (on the x-axis) when there is missing data
Tramline, now supports adding your organization's team structure to the platform. This opens up a lot of possiblity around correlating team performance metrics with release dynamics.
We're kicking things off with release stability & contribution analysis across teams.
What, or rather, who is holding up your releases? We break down which team has contributed the most to the stability of releases.
The flip side of this analysis is equally interesting. Instead of who is holding things up, you get rough indicators on who is contributing the most to a release.
Since this data is also available in real-time for ongoing releases, it complements the insights provided in the Ongoing Work section. Release managers now get a pretty good sense of what (and who) is holding up the release from moving ahead.
This is one of our first organizational performance-related features, and we're very excited to see what more we can do in this direction 🚀
Previously, halting a staged rollout on Play Store through Tramline meant that your release was essentially stopped. But now halting a rollout can be undone and you can resume the next stages of your rollout. This behaviour is now in parity with what the Play Store Console allows you to do.
Backed by popular demand, we now support even more loaded configuration options around distributing build notes. For every distribution channel you select, you can now pick out of any of the three choices:
- Send auto-generated notes from Tramline
- Custom release notes
- No notes
Improvements and Fixes
- Add additional commit info to the step failure notification
- Add automatic retries when fetching artifacts from GitHub workflows
- API to fetch releases for a branch now accounts for multiple releases
- Bump version only when new changes have come since the last submission
We now track all the PRs that you create against the release branch during a release. This serves as a solid foundation for us to start tracking behavioural and process-related aspects around shipping code during a release.
Currently, we display all PRs (along with their labels), emphasizing those that haven't been merged yet. With this system in place, we can soon start gathering information, such as PRs that caused delays in a release or the size of commit diffs that were shipped after a release had already commenced.
In a cross-platform release, previously, the release metadata was common across both platforms. Although simpler, it can be quite limiting. We now support adding release metadata to individual platforms for a cross-platform release. The metadata is tuned to the details the particular store expects.
We will soon launch a full-fledged marketing and release metadata management system; including support for screenshots and locales.
Earlier last year, we added support for auto-generated build notes. Our users find this feature useful, but sometimes it can become spammy to send these notes to everyone; as they are generated and sent for all distribution channels that are non-prod.
Now, when setting up steps for train, you can select whether you want to generate and notify with the auto-gen build notes, so you have full control over what gets sent out to whom.
Improvements and Fixes
- Backmerge PRs now get automatically merged
- Do not compute build health metadata if there's less than one data point
- Show chart for build health metadata only when present
- If app size is sent as custom metadata, override the one computed by Tramline
- If a review is intentionally skipped by users, do not retry on deployment failure
- For the Parallel-Working-Branch branching strategy, fix a bug that was creating multiple PRs
- For the Parallel-Working-Branch branching strategy, check for diff between branches before creating PRs
- Release Schedule can now be added for all branching strategies
- Fix around inaccurate release changelogs for hotfix releases
- TestFlight releases auto-complete if they pass after a previous review failure
There are some metadata around an app build that are, as of now, out of the purview of Tramline. These could be things like Unit Test Coverage, App Launch Time or something else completely custom to your team. Tramline now allows you to associate these metadata with the builds in Tramline and see the trends during the release.
You can use the API documented here to send these custom build metadata.
In addition to the custom build metadata, Tramline automatically tracks your app size across the RC builds generated in the release.
These trends are not just useful to monitor your build health over time, but they can also help you make go/no-go decisions about your release right here from your release dashboard.
App review failures are the bane of app releases. Tramline now handles app review failures from the stores and allows your to continue with the release process after resolving the issues.
For iOS releases, a review failure can be tackled in a couple of ways – via communication with the review team or by submitting a new build for review.
Tramline now monitors the state of review after a rejection. If the review is resolved by communication, Tramline will sync the status, once the review is approved, and you can continue with the rollout of the build from your Tramline release dashboard.
If, however, you need to submit a new build, simply make a change in your release branch and Tramline will trigger a new build for submission.
Tramline will prepare the new release version, set phased release if configured, upload all the necessary release metadata, and allow you to submit the build from your release dashboard.
When an app review fails on the Google Play Store, a new build cannot be sent for review via Tramline due to the limitations of Google Play Publishing API. Tramline will, however, instruct you on what to do right there on the release dashboard.
Once you resolve the issue by submitting the new build for review manually from Console UI, you can sync the status back on Tramline.
Tramline will verify the correct status, sync the changes made on the Console UI, and continue with the release as configured.
Tramline now supports App Variants which are akin to product flavors or build variants, but with an explicit requirement of having a different bundle identifier.
For example, you can have a staging variant com.tramline.ueno.staging which is different from your primary com.tramline.ueno app.
App variants allow you to configure different build distribution endpoints for each of these variants. Eg. different Firebase App Distribution apps for different variants.
When defining a release step, you can now choose the app variant (default being the primary app) and its configuration to be used for the build generation and distribution.
Tramline automatically manages your release version across your app releases, ensuring that the next release or hotfix always starts with the correct version.
But, there might be times when you need to start the next release with a custom release version. Tramline now allows you to override the default behavior and start a release with a custom release version.
The custom release version goes through the usual validations like correct the SemVer structure and allowed version as per the stores before starting the release.
Improvements and Fixes
- Fix release notes to allow backticks and other special characters allowed by the stores
- Add the missing release activity on stopping a release
- Support aab upload to Firebase App Distribution
- Fix fetching changes since the last release for releases with tagging disabled
- Add the missing deployment failure notification
- Handle attachment upload in progress error from App Store Connect when submitting the build for review
- Change the external link in release health cards to the release-specific dashboard for Bugsnag integration
Most people want to avoid hotfixes entirely, but when push comes to shove, you don't want your regular release processes to become shackles.
This is where hotfix releases come in. By starting a hotfix release, Tramline will:
- Predict the correct version to be hotfixed
- Initiate a hotfix from a previously completed release branch
- Optionally, initiate a hotfix from a tag, creating a new hotfix branch on top
Importantly, you can quickly deploy a hotfix release because these releases are special. They allow you to bypass the defined step order, skipping the review steps and going straight to production.
For synchronized releases, as is often the case, hotfixes also support releasing only to a single platform to avoid spending time on manually skipping the other platform.
Stores can only have a single live build, which means penultimate releases can be hotfixed as long as the latest release hasn't started rolling out.
In essence, hotfixes are a conceptual abstraction. You are creating a new release instead of directly fixing the previous one, which might still be live.
It's an abstraction of a process that is manually carried out, and Tramline offers this as an atomic package where the details aren't important to know.
Because Tramline simultaneously controls phased rollouts and tracks adoption, we can now uniquely correlate the two things in a single graph. This is something that would've previously been very tricky to automatically do.
This feature is available once you connect a Monitoring and Analytics integration like Bugsnag and start a production release.
For synchronized releases, if you decide against releasing to both platforms, you can now belatedly mark one platform as finished. This allows the release to proceed without the need to restart the entire release or pause the other platform.
Improvements and Fixes
- Handle the rare "startup failure" error from GitHub Actions
- Handle Firebase (App Distribution) degradation gracefully
- Changelogs can now optionally pick up only the merge commits for summary, instead of all commits between releases
- Show the commit application time for the release (along with the commit authoring time)
We now generate a high-level view of aggregated statistics across your releases. You can use these metrics to draw insights on the overall health of your release process.
This includes important DORA metrics like Release Frequency and Fixes During Release (number of store versions generated).
Other key metrics tracked are:
- Release duration
- Time spent by your team in various steps of the release process
- Contributors to the release
- Contributors towards the stability of the release
In addition to the above, you can see how your iOS build review time from the store trends over time.
We have added a new category of integration in Tramline: Monitoring and Analytics.
By connecting your error and metric tracking system, you can now monitor release metrics and stability right from your ongoing release page to make correct decisions about your release rollout.
We currently support Bugsnag only, but more integrations are coming soon.
We have added two more configurations to your release train:
- If your CI workflow generates multiple artifacts, you can now provide a name to choose the correct build artifact (aab/apk/ipa) among the files generated. When left blank, Tramline will choose the largest file generated as the build artifact.
- You can now optionally add a suffix to the tags generated at the end of the release. This feature can be used for distinguishing, say, nightly release tags from standard release tags.
These can be set in the train Settings page.
Improvements and Fixes
- Handle degraded AppStore Connect APIs gracefully
- Fix all builds page to be accessible by viewers
- Fix scheduled release notification to show the correct release version
- Override manual trigger config for a single step train
- Do not finish deployment run when staged rollout is halted
- Restrict uninvited signups from configured domains (enabled on request from customer)
For most teams, a release lasts more than a week and a lot happens in that time. Numerous builds are generated, those builds are approved or rejected, pull requests are created for backmerges and so on. The releases are your system of record.
We now generate a summary capturing all the essentials of your release after it is completed.
This shows the total time spent on each step of the release, number of builds generated during that step and subsequently submitted to your QA team for testing and approval.
Additionally, you can see the number of versions submitted to the store for review, when they got approved, and which of those versions reached a percentage of your users during the course of the release.
The summary also includes release duration, commits that landed on the release branch, staged rollout timeline, pull requests and auto-backmerge summary.
We've made some improvements in build (tester) notes that are sent to all non-production distribution channels (TestFlight, Firebase App Distribution), as well as the notifications themselves:
- The first build generated for the release now has all changes since the last release as build notes.
- Previously, Tramline automatically picked up the entire commit message when generating build notes. Now, you can elect to generate more compact build notes by picking just the title of the commit and ignore the multi-line description. This is especially useful for PR merge commits. This configuration can be found in the train Settings page.
- The build notes in the notifications are now sent as threaded messages to keep the primary post focussed and compact.
Not everyone in your team is the correct audience for all release-related notifications. So now we allow you to configure which notifications you want, and what all channels do they need to go in the Notification Settings page for each of your release trains.
If you feel that your team doesn't require any notifications, as everyone is already informed through Tramline, you can deactivate all notifications through the train Settings page.
Improvements and Fixes
- Handle some new errors from Google Play Store and add retries around the ones that can be retried without user input
- Reduce the visual footprint of a Slack notification, compact the header and footer to improve visibility of the notification content
- Some minor security updates including rate limits on forgot password requests
- The download artifact URL for the build sent in notifications is now an authenticated URL
- Fix the upcoming release flow to manage version bump correctly across the platforms when the ongoing release creates a new store version
The Event Timeline has been renamed to Release Activity. While the essence of the page remains the same, it is now much more valuable. For cross-platform apps, the release activity for all platforms is displayed collectively in a single pane. You can optionally filter for a single platform if you want to isolate the activity. Additionally, it also logs the users that initiated particular manual actions, thereby functioning as a comprehensive audit log of all the activities carried out during a release.
We now recommend using the deploy-action for those using GitHub actions as their CI/CD solution. This method bundles the various inputs (like version-code and version-name) that Tramline provides, into a single input. It also enables us to introduce new inputs without necessitating downstream modifications in the future.
GitHub currently does not support triggering CI workflows for a particular commit SHA and can only activate the HEAD of a branch. This restriction can lead to race-conditions within Tramline, potentially triggering workflows for an incorrect commit if it has been superseded by a new commit.
This action also fixes that problem by checking out your repo to the correct commit ref.
You can now setup a couple of new configurations on your release train:
-
Tramline has been automatically triggering the release step if it has reached it before in a prior commit. Now, you have the ability to customize this – you can elect to manually approve before the release step is triggered.
-
For cross-platform apps, Tramline has been adding platform-specific tags to the last commit SHA that was deployed successfully to production. We've expanded this to now optionally add platform-specific tags to all commit SHAs that were even partially deployed to production, like in a phased release → hotfix commit → phased release scenario.
Tramline maintains extensive data regarding your releases, both during the run-time and for posterity. We've now implemented two API endpoints for you to access some of this information. This can assist in organizing aspects of your release process that Tramline does not currently handle natively.
See API docs here.
Improvements and Fixes
- When in hotfix mode, allow running deployments out-of-order
- Send auto-generated build notes to non-production groups on Play Store (previously only TestFlight and Firebase App Distribution were supported)
- Scheduled release trains now have a log of all scheduling attempts made (successful or otherwise), including the reasons for skipping them
- Allow collapsing the entire pane that lists all commits in a release to reclaim space and focus on the current build
Up until now, Tramline only merged changes made in the release branch back into your working branch towards the end of a release. For teams who end up with a lot of changes in their release branch, it is essential to get new changes back as quickly as possible. Doing this avoids both merge hells at the end and hands control over to individuals to ensure they are merging their changes back.
Tramline now allows configuring a train to cherry-pick commits from the release branch and make individual Patch PRs and assign them to the original authors for them to drive their isolated changes back to the working branch (typically main).
This significantly reduces the burden on the release pilot wrangling backmerges by hand as new changes are landed, but more importantly, also adds visibility and individual accountability into the process.
Tramline generally still recommends an "almost trunk" strategy – wherein one cherry-picks commits from the working branch to the release branch. But this of course, has many adoption constraints and isn't always organizationally feasible.
You can now start ramping up a new release before your current release finishes. This allows you to cut back on the additional time spent waiting for a full phased rollout to complete in the current release and start stabalizing new features on the working branch.
This feature is available when you have a multi-step train (RC and production both) and you have a production channel in your release step.
Improvements and Fixes
- The build queue commits are reverse chronologically ordered
- We now have formatted and mobile-friendly emails
- Build notes sent on TestFlight are size-truncated to the App Store limit
- You can edit release schedules as long as there isn't an active ongoing release
- Stronger password validations
- Addtional notifications around staged rollouts / phased releases
- Faster CI workflow triggers from Tramline
For large teams, the process of release stabilization often extends over several days. Throughout this period, testers and stakeholders may find themselves inundated with a continuous stream of new builds as bug fixes are incrementally added to the release branch.
For better control over build generation, you can now configure triggers that will batch commits based on time and volume before triggering new builds from Tramline.
You can do this under the Settings page of your release train.
Users shipping brand new apps to Play Store for the very first time often face issues releasing to public channels. This is because the Play Store requires one to make an initial deploy manually before using the APIs.
To avoid having the releases fail late after everything is set up, we now detect apps that are in Draft mode on the Play Store and disallow making new releases until a manual public release is made from the Play Console.
When we introduced cross-platform apps in Tramline a couple of months back, the only CI/CD provider we supported was GitHub Actions.
Bitrise is now also supported as another CI/CD provider. For an example on how to configure a multi-platform (and stack) Bitrise pipeline, check out this workflow on our test bunny flutter app – Ueno.
Improvements and Fixes
- Check for presence of the working branch on the git repo when creating a new release train
- Show all commits in a single push on the live release page, not just the
HEAD - Simplify the first train creation wizard for better onboarding
- Add platform identifiers in cross-platform release notifications
- Add missing notification for review approval from App Store
- App versions are only incremented against the previous successful release. Does not account for stopped or failed ones.
- It is now possible to configure if distributions in a release step will be automatic or manual
- More guardrails around commit recency when triggering new builds
- Release schedules can now be edited until the release train is activated
Releases can now be configured to run on a pre-defined schedule. You can configure this on the Settings page of a release train.
A great use-case for this is to set-up nightly trains that automatically trigger latest dev builds and send them to internal teams on a consistent cadence.
Notifications now have deep links to both Firebase App Distribution and TestFlight builds, so you don't have to go hunting when a new RC build is available for testing.
Improvements and Fixes
- Support for selecting Internal Groups as a distribution channel in TestFlight
- Release tags are now guaranteed to be unique. If a tag clashes with a previous one, we append the commit SHA to the tag!
For teams with apps built in cross-platform stacks like React Native and Flutter, we now support synchronized release trains across both platforms.
- This allows teams to run their releases from a single branch.
- You get centralized control over both the stores.
- This also ensures all changes get applied to both platforms, but also gives you the nuance to apply selective changes to either platform when needed.
Since there can be cases where there is a drift between what is shipped to one store over another, we also cut platform-specific tags to disambiguate the commits.
The changes in your app since the last release are now visible on the live release page to provide context on what all is getting shipped in the current release.
Well-formed, sanitized commit messages since the last good build are now available as test notes in Slack, Firebase App Distribution and TestFlight.
Improvements and Fixes
- Release suffixes are now optional for steps
- We now fetch latest build numbers from stores to reduce probability of version clashes
- Previous running steps are cancelled (both in Tramline and in CI) when a new commit lands
- All non-production deployments are now triggered automatically to allow fully automated releases (this paves way for automatic scheduled releases!)
We know how setting up the integrations and release trains can be a bit tricky to navigate. So we now have a quick wizard that helps you get started on your very first release train.
We have couple of enhacements towards the end of a release.
- Tramline automatically starts wrapping up the release and starts the finalization process (cutting tags, creating PRs, locking the release etc.) as soon as the release step finishes.
- For the Almost Trunk branching strategy, we create and merge a PR at the end to get all your release branch fixes back to the working branch.
We now support a partial SemVer scheme like MAJOR.MINOR along with MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH. Additionally, Tramline used to bump up versions for every commit that would land on the release branch. This has now changed to bump up versions (either minor or patch, depending on your strategy) only during hotfixes, i.e. commits that are landed during a production rollout.
Improvements and Fixes
- Show details about your integration in the integrations page (bundle id, connection info, project info etc.)
- Add an option to manually refresh Slack channels, in case the list is stale