Procedures¶

Specifying a milestone (version)¶

AMY follows Semantic Versioning when possible; however, since this is a web application and not a library, we have come up with these rules to bumping versions:

hotfix or a fix release: bump patch version
normal release: bump minor version
major changes (e.g. big project gets merged): bump major version.

In future, once CI/CD is implemented, we may consider switching to commitizen which will help with generating changelogs and bumping versions accordingly.

Milestone name should indicate the release version. For example, if next release is v3.15.0, then the milestone collecting issues and PRs should be named v3.15 or v3.15.0.

Feature development¶

Developers are encouraged to use feature flags for development of new features in case they would have to be released to production in dark.

On the End of Each Milestone¶

Close milestone using GitHub UI.
Run python docs/generate_changelog.py MILESTONE_NAME to generate changelog for given release; paste command's output to the top of CHANGELOG.md file.
Follow Release Procedure.
Follow Deployment Procedure.
Write to amy@lists.carpentries.org mailing list. The suggested subject of the new thread is "[AMY] New release v2.X.Y".

Release Procedure¶

We assume that you want to release AMY v2.X.Y.

Execute the following commands on your local machine, not production.

Move to AMY root directory (the one with manage.py file) using cd command.

Make sure you have configured repositories:

origin for your repository on GitHub
upstream for carpentries/amy repo on GitHub

For example, this is the correct configuration for chrismedrela:

$ git remote -v
origin  git@github.com:chrismedrela/amy.git (fetch)
origin  git@github.com:chrismedrela/amy.git (push)
upstream    git@github.com:carpentries/amy.git (fetch)
upstream    git@github.com:carpentries/amy.git (push)

Make sure your local develop and main branches are up to date:

$ git checkout develop
$ git pull upstream develop
$ git push origin develop

$ git checkout main
$ git pull upstream main
$ git push origin main

Pushes to your origin remote are optional.

Merge develop into main branch (be careful, as there are sometimes conflicts that need to be manually resolved):
```
$ git checkout main
$ git merge --no-ff develop
```

Bump version on main (non-dev version corresponding to the milestone):

$ # manually edit version in `amy/__init__.py` and `package.json`
$ # use non-dev version string, e.g. `"v3.3.0"`
$ git add amy/__init__.py package.json
$ git commit -m "Bumping version to vX.Y.0"

Just to be safe, run tests:
```
$ make test
```
Tag a release.
```
$ git tag -a "vX.Y.0" -s -m "AMY release vX.Y.0"
```
Omit -s flag if you cannot create signed tags. See Git documentation for more info about signed tags.

Push main and the new tag everywhere:

$ git push origin main --tags
$ git push upstream main --tags

Bump version on develop (dev version corresponding to the milestone):

$ git checkout develop
$ # manually edit version in `amy/__init__.py` and `package.json`
$ # use dev version string, e.g. `"v3.4.0-dev"`
$ git add amy/__init__.py package.json
$ git commit -m "Bumping version to vX.Y.0-dev"

This step is only needed if next development cycle begins (ie. no hotfix release was done).

And push it everywhere:

$ git push upstream develop
$ git push origin develop

Note: it is acceptable to use a release branch as a base for release. This is very useful for example if a bugfix release must be created, but a feature from upcoming minor/major release has already been merged to develop. This is also useful when multiple features are worked on simultaneously.

What are the changes:

Code is branched out from develop (not necessarily the HEAD) to release/vX.Y.Z branch.
Optional cherry-picks follow from develop to release/vX.Y.Z.
Release branch is merged to main with --no-ff option.

Deployment procedure using Ansible¶

Moved to relevant repository README.md.