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Release-Process.md

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How to do a Kata Containers Release

This document lists the tasks required to create a Kata Release.

Requirements

  • GitHub permissions to run workflows.

Versioning

The Kata Containers project uses semantic versioning for all releases. Semantic versions are comprised of three fields in the form:

MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH

When MINOR increases, the new release adds new features but without changing the existing behavior.

When MAJOR increases, the new release adds new features, bug fixes, or both and which changes the behavior from the previous release (incompatible with previous releases).

A major release will also likely require a change of the container manager version used, -for example Containerd or CRI-O. Please refer to the release notes for further details.

Important : the Kata Containers project doesn't have stable branches (see this issue for details). Bug fixes are released as part of MINOR or MAJOR releases only. PATCH is always 0.

Release Process

Bump the VERSION and Chart.yaml file

When the kata-containers/kata-containers repository is ready for a new release, first create a PR to set the release in the VERSION file and update the version and appVersion in the Chart.yaml file and have it merged.

Lock the main branch

In order to prevent any PRs getting merged during the release process, and slowing the release process down, by impacting the payload caches, we have recently trailed setting the main branch to read only whilst the release action runs.

Note

Admin permission is needed to complete this task.

Check GitHub Actions

We make use of GitHub actions in the release file from the kata-containers/kata-containers repository to build and upload release artifacts.

Note

Write permissions to trigger the action.

The action is manually triggered and is responsible for generating a new release (including a new tag), pushing those to the kata-containers/kata-containers repository. The new release is initially created as a draft. It is promoted to an official release when the whole workflow has completed successfully.

Check the actions status page to verify all steps in the actions workflow have completed successfully. On success, a static tarball containing Kata release artifacts will be uploaded to the Release page.

If the workflow fails because of some external environmental causes, e.g. network timeout, simply re-run the failed jobs until they eventually succeed.

If for some reason you need to cancel the workflow or re-run it entirely, go first to the Release page and delete the draft release from the previous run.

Unlock the main branch

After the release process has concluded, either unlock the main branch, or ask an admin to do it.

Improve the release notes

Release notes are auto-generated by the GitHub CLI tool used as part of our release workflow. However, some manual tweaking may still be necessary in order to highlight the most important features and bug fixes in a specific release.

With this in mind, please, poke @channel on #kata-dev and people who worked on the release will be able to contribute to that.

Announce the release

Publish in Slack and Kata mailing list that new release is ready.