Before starting the release process, verify the following:
- All work required for this release has been completed and the team is ready to release.
- All Github Actions tests are green on main.
- The ReadtheDocs build for "latest" is marked as passed. To avoid mysterious errors, best practice is to empty your browser cache when reading new versions of the docs!
- The public documentation for the "latest" branch looks correct, and the release notes includes the last change which was made on main.
- Get agreement on the version number to use for the release.
EvalML uses semantic versioning. Every release has a major, minor and patch version number, and are displayed like so: <majorVersion>.<minorVersion>.<patchVersion>
.
If you'd like to create a development release, which won't be deployed to pypi and conda and marked as a generally-available production release, please add a "dev" prefix to the patch version, i.e. X.X.devX
. Note this claims the patch number--if the previous release was 0.12.0
, a subsequent dev release would be 0.12.dev1
, and the following release would be 0.12.2
, not 0.12.1
. Development releases deploy to test.pypi.org instead of to pypi.org.
After confirming the release is ready to go in step 0, we'll freeze the main
branch and kick off the release performance tests.
Once a perf test document has been reviewed and approved by the team, we'll move forward with the release.
Please use the following pattern for the release PR branch name: "release_vX.X.X". Doing so will bypass our release notes checkin test which requires all other PRs to add a release note entry.
Create a release PR with the following changes:
- Update
setup.py
andevalml/__init__.py
to bump__version__
to the new version. - Move all entries in
docs/source/release_notes.rst
currently listed under**Future Releases**
to be under a new heading with the version number and release date. - Make sure
**Future Releases**
is empty except for the sub-headings, so it's ready for new entries. - Populate the release PR body with a copy of this release's release notes, reformatted to GitHub markdown. You'll reuse this text in step 2. You can generate the markdown by running
tools/format_release_notes.sh
locally. - Confirm that all release items are in the release notes under the correct header, and that no extra items are listed. You may have to do an "empty cache and hard reset" in your browser to see updates.
An example can be found here: alteryx#163
Checklist before merging:
- PR has been reviewed and approved.
- All tests are currently green on checkin and on main.
- The ReadtheDocs build for the release PR branch has passed, and the resulting docs contain the expected release notes.
- Confirm with the team that
main
will be frozen until step 3 (github release) is complete.
Merge the release PR.
After merging, verify again that ReadtheDocs "latest" is correct.
After the release pull request has been merged into the main branch, it is time to draft the GitHub release. Here's GitHub's documentation on how to do that. Include the following when creating the release:
- The target should be the main branch, which is the default value.
- The tag should be the version number with a "v" prefix (e.g. "vX.X.X").
- The release title is the same as the tag, "vX.X.X"
- The release description should be the full release notes updates for the release, reformatted as GitHub markdown (from the release PR body in step 1).
Note that by targeting main
, there must be no new merges to main
from the moment we merge the release PR to when we publish the new GitHub release. Otherwise, the release will point at the wrong commit on main
!
Save the release as a draft and make sure it looks correct. You could start the draft while waiting for the release PR to be ready to merge.
When it's ready to go, hit "Publish release." This will create a "vX.X.X" tag for the release, which tells ReadtheDocs to build and update the "stable" version. This will also deploy the release to pypi, making it publicly accessible!
Creating the GitHub release should have updated the default stable
docs branch to point at the new version. You'll now need to activate the new release version on ReadtheDocs so its publicly visible in the list of versions. This is important so users can view old documentation versions which match their installed version.
Please do the following:
- Log in to our ReadtheDocs account and go here to view the version list.
- Find "vX.X.X" in the version list, and click "Edit" on the right.
- Check the "Active" checkbox and set privacy level to "Public", then click "Save"
- Verify "vX.X.X" is now visible as a version on our ReadtheDocs page. You may have to do an "empty cache and hard reset" in your browser to see updates.
- Verify "stable" corresponds with the new version, which should've been done in step 2.
Now that the release has been made in the repo, to pypi and in our documentation, the final step is making sure the new release is publicly pip-installable via pypi.
In a fresh virtualenv, install evalml via pip and ensure it installs successfully:
# should come back empty
pip freeze | grep evalml
pip install evalml
python --version
# should now list the correct version
python -c "import evalml; print(evalml.__version__)"
pip freeze | grep evalml
Note: make sure when you do this that you're in a virtualenv, your current working directory isn't in the evalml repo, and that you haven't added your repo to the PYTHONPATH
, because in both cases python could pick up the repo instead, even in a virtualenv.
A couple of hours after you publish the GitHub release, a bot will open a PR to our feedstock that automatically bumps the recipe to use the latest version of the package. In order to publish our latest conda package, we need to make some changes to the bot's PR and merge it.
The bot's PR will will remove the quotes around the version tag in the recipe.
Removing these quotes will break our build_conda_pkg
CI job so add them back in and push your changes to the bot's PR.
For example, lines 3-5 of the recipe should look like the following:
package:
name: evalml-core
version: '{{ version }}'
For help on how to push changes to the bot's PR please read this document.
You may need to make other changes to the bot's PR. For example, there is a CI check called "Check conda versions/check_versions" that
verifies whether the dependency versions of the conda update PR match the versions of the recipe used in
build_conda_pkg
(located in .github/meta.yaml
). If the check is red, modify the dependencies so they match those in .github/meta.yaml
.
After you make the necessary changes and merge the PR, our latest package will be deployed to conda-forge! To verify, run this in a fresh conda environment:
conda install -c conda-forge evalml
Verify the latest version of evalml
got installed by running
python -c "import evalml; print(evalml.__version__)"