Releases

Warning

Be carefull your develop branch is up-to-date before starting a release, and both your master and develop branches are up-to-date before finishing it!

You will use the release feature to publish new minor or major versions, but not patches. It is designed to begin a new fresh release from the develop branch.

Note

You can have several releases on a project; but honestly, I cannot find a use case where it should really be used. It’s up to you ;)

Creation

Just as hotfixes, the branch name must be the version it will become. Let’s say we want to release a new minor 1.4.0:

$ git flow release start 1.4.0

This will automatically do the following:

  1. create a new branch named release/1.4.0 from the develop branch,
  2. checkout the release/1.4.0 branch.

Lifetime

Warning

Until it’s finished, you can still add new hotfixes or features (anyways, if a new feature must reach your release, you’ve a planning issue ;)).

But keep in mind nothing will not reach your release branch until you do something!.

Most of the time, your release branch should have a quite short lifetime; and changes should be very light comparing your develop. As an example, on several project I own (or I’ve owned); the release branch was created to update the changelog if any, add the release date, and eventually bump the version.

This kind of branch may be used for testing purposes also.

Sometimes, you can also just create a release to finish it immediately without doing any changes… :-)

If a new hotfix has been added, than you’ll have to get it back to your release branch. To know how to proceed, you’ll have to determine if something else has changed; because you probably do not want a feature finished after you decide to release to be backported.

Note

Remember that you should always prefer to merge or cherry pick rather than report changes manually; that would cause conflicts while finishing.

In the simpliest case, nothing else has changed in your develop, just update it and run:

(release/1.4.0) $ git merge develop

If there were other changes, it may be a bit more complex. You can either cherry-pick the fix commit, or use advanced git possibilities of merge command (such as merging a specific range of commits, for example); refer to the Git documentation.

Pull request

If you’ve just created the release to bump the version, it is not mandatory to open a pull request. On the other hand, if you’ve made fixes, you’ll have to.

If you’re on the second use case, push last changes to your fork, go to your github fork page, select your branch and clik “New pull request” button.

You can provide aditionnal details if any, submit, and wait for another developer to review your changes!

Once accepted, or if you do not need a PR, go back to your local copy, and see the paragraph below.

Finishing

Warning

Before running the commands to end your release, make sure that:

  • your master and develop branches are up-to-date
  • no other tag using the same version number has been created (use git tag | sort -V)

Warning

You have to use Git command line, and not Github facilities to finish the release!

Finishing a release is as simple as:

$ git flow release finish 1.4.0

This will:

  • Merge changes into the master branch,
  • Create a 1.4.0 tag,
  • Merge changes into the develop branch,
  • Remove your local release\1.4.0 branch.

Once your release has been finished; you’ll have to push master, develop and tags and also remove remote release/1.4.0 branch (if any):

(master)  $ git push
(master)  $ git push --tags
(master)  $ git checkout develop
(develop) $ git push
          $ git push {github_username} :release/1.4.0

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