Releasing software

We aim to release about once a month, the releases are done per repository (if they have changes) as Docker images to DockerHub.

Release Compas open scd

In the compas-open-scd repository, update the version number in packages/compas-open-scd/package.json and make sure the submodule pointers are correct. Go to https://github.com/com-pas/compas-open-scd. Under releases click Draft a new release. In Choose a tag, create a new tag using the new version number. Click Generate release notes — review the notes and ensure they’re correct.

Publishing the release will trigger a Github workflow and build the Docker image and upload it to Docker hub.

Release backend service

We are using release please which automatically creates and updates a release PR. The PR contains an up to date changelog based on the conventional commit messsages and sets the new version number. To trigger a release the release please PR has to be merged, which triggers the release please workflow (currently the release please PR has to be merged twice, because it creates a snapshot version first). The workflow will build the Maven packages, upload them to GitHub packages and build the Docker image and upload it to Docker hub.

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 release please will automatically generate the release notes using commit messages. 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.