Release

A guide for deploying a release to the production environment.

Background

This project's release guide is based on:

• git-flow
• Semantic Versioning (semver)
• npm-version
• Let's stop saying Master/Slave

Steps

1. $ git checkout develop
2. $ git pull origin develop
3. $ git checkout -b release-<newversion>
4. Do all of the release branch testing necessary. This could be as simple as running npm test:ci, or it could take user testing over a few days.
5. $ npm version <newversion> (see npm-version for valid values of ).
6. $ git checkout release
7. $ git merge --no-ff release-<newversion>
8. $ git push && git push --tags
9. $ git checkout develop
10. $ git merge --no-ff release-<newversion>
11. $ git push origin develop
12. Draft a new release on Github. Choose the tag that is the release version you just created, and then title it v<newversion>. Then click "Generate release notes". Publish the release and you are finished!

Travis CI will automatically deploy the release to production, as well as push a production tagged Docker image to DockerHub.

Steps for a Patch Release

Sometimes you might need to push a release for an isolated and small bug fix without what's currently been merged into the develop branch. The steps for pushing a Patch Release are similar to a standard Release, except you work with the release branch as opposed to develop.

1. $ git checkout release
2. $ git pull origin release
3. $ git checkout -b release-<newversion> (increment patch version)
4. Do all of the release branch testing necessary. This could be as simple as running npm test:ci, or it could take user testing over a few days.
5. $ npm version <newversion> (see npm-version for valid values of )(npm version patch).
6. $ git checkout release
7. $ git merge --no-ff release-<newversion>
8. $ git push && git push --tags
9. $ git checkout develop
10. $ git merge --no-ff release-<newversion>
11. $ git push origin develop
12. Draft a new release on Github. Choose the tag that is the release version you just created, and then title it v<newversion>. Then click "Generate release notes". Publish the release and you are finished!

What if the PR Bug Fix is branched from develop?

1. Make a copy of the branch locally: gh pr checkout ##
2. git checkout release
3. git pull origin release
4. git checkout -b <descriptive-branch-name>
5. git cherry-pick <every sha in PR branch>
6. Make a new PR that merges into release (has a base branch release)
7. Done!