Releasing software

Create a release

To create a release of the software we are using the release functionality of GitHub. Under the tab code there is a section Releases (Right side). When selected all current releases will be displayed, and a new release can be created (draft release). The standard branch to create a release from should be the main branch.

Enter the following values when creating a new release:

• Choose a tag: Enter a new version using semantic versioning, for example 0.1.4. Also press Create new tag to create the new label.
• Target: This should normally be main.
• Release title: Name of the release, use the following template Release <tag> of <project name>, for instance Release 0.1.4 of SCL Auto Alignment Service
• Describe the release: These are the release notes, press the button Auto-generate release notes to generate these. Check Configure release notes generation to configure how these are generated.

Now press Publish release to create the release. For every repository that creates a software product (artifacts or docker images) a GitHub Action (release-project.yml) is defined. This action runs when a release is created.

on:
  release:
    types: [released]

Depending on the type of project different steps will be executed. Common steps are:

• Checking out the source code,
• Extracting the entered version from the Git Tag.
• Set version using Maven
• Setup Maven settings.xml file

Depending on the type of project other steps will be executed. Some examples are:

• Build and publish the software to GitHub Packages using Maven
• Build and publish the docker image to DockerHub using Maven
• Build and publish the docker image to DockerHub using NPM and Docker

Publish artifacts using Maven

To publish artifacts to GiHub Packages a distribution section needs to be added to pom.xml of the root.

<distributionManagement>
    <repository>
        <id>github-packages-compas</id>
        <name>GitHub Packages</name>
        <url>https://maven.pkg.github.com/com-pas/[repo-name]</url>
    </repository>
</distributionManagement>

The ID is the same as the ID used for the repository section in Maven Build. This way the same credentials will be used to connect to GitHub Packages as described Maven Build. Replace [repo-name] with the name of the repository from CoMPAS.

Configure release notes generation

During creating of a release we will use the GitHub feature to automatically generate the release notes using the pull requests. The way these release notes are created can be configured by adding/updating the file release.yml to the directory .github.

The content of the file release.yml is currently:

changelog:
  exclude:
    labels:
      - wontfix
      - duplicate
      - invalid
  categories:
    - title: New Features
      labels:
        - enhancement
    - title: Bugfixes
      labels:
        - bug
    - title: Tooling changes
      labels:
        - tooling
    - title: Dependency updates
      labels:
        - dependencies
    - title: Other Changes
      labels:
        - "*"

This will group different pull request using the different labels.