Release-Process.md

How to do a Kata Containers Release

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

• How to do a Kata Containers Release
  • Requirements
  • Release Process
    • Bump all Kata repositories
    • Merge all bump version Pull requests
    • Tag all Kata repositories
    • Check Git-hub Actions
    • Create OBS Packages
    • Create release notes
    • Announce the release

Requirements

• hub

• OBS account with permissions on /home:katacontainers

• GitHub permissions to push tags and create releases in Kata repositories.

• GPG configured to sign git tags. https://help.github.com/articles/generating-a-new-gpg-key/

• You should configure your GitHub to use your ssh keys (to push to branches). See https://help.github.com/articles/adding-a-new-ssh-key-to-your-github-account/.

  • As an alternative, configure hub to push and fork with HTTPS, git config --global hub.protocol https (Not tested yet) *

Release Process

Bump all Kata repositories

• We have set up a Jenkins job to bump the version in the VERSION file in all Kata repositories. Go to the Jenkins bump-job page to trigger a new job.

• Start a new job with variables for the job passed as:

  • BRANCH=<the-branch-you-want-to-bump>
  • NEW_VERSION=<the-new-kata-version>

  For example, in the case where you want to make a patch release 1.10.2, the variable NEW_VERSION should be 1.10.2 and BRANCH should point to stable-1.10. In case of an alpha or release candidate release, BRANCH should point to master branch.

Alternatively, you can also bump the repositories using a script in the Kata packaging repo

$ cd ${GOPATH}/src/github.com/kata-containers/packaging/release
$ export NEW_VERSION=<the-new-kata-version>
$ export BRANCH=<the-branch-you-want-to-bump>
$ ./update-repository-version.sh -p "$NEW_VERSION" "$BRANCH"

Merge all bump version Pull requests

• The above step will create a GitHub pull request in the Kata projects. Trigger the CI using /test command on each bump Pull request.
• Check any failures and fix if needed.
• Work with the Kata approvers to verify that the CI works and the pull requests are merged.

Tag all Kata repositories

Once all the pull requests to bump versions in all Kata repositories are merged, tag all the repositories as shown below.

$ cd ${GOPATH}/src/github.com/kata-containers/packaging/release
$ git checkout  <kata-branch-to-release>
$ git pull
$ ./tag_repos.sh -p -b "$BRANCH" tag

Check Git-hub Actions

We make use of GitHub actions in this file in the kata-containers/kata-containers repository to build and upload release artifacts. This action is auto triggered with the above step when a new tag is pushed to the kata-containers/kata-conatiners repository.

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.

Create OBS Packages

• We have set up an Azure Pipelines job to trigger generation of Kata packages in OBS. Go to the Azure Pipelines job that creates OBS packages.

• Click on "Create release" (blue button, at top right corner). It should prompt you for variables to be passed to the release job. They should look like:

  BRANCH="the-kata-branch-that-is-release"
  BUILD_HEAD=false
  OBS_BRANCH="the-kata-branch-that-is-release"
  

  Note: If the release is Alpha , Beta , or RC (that is part of a master release), please use OBS_BRANCH=master.

  The above step shall create OBS packages for Kata for various distributions that Kata supports and test them as well.

• Verify that the packages have built successfully by checking the Kata OBS project page.

• Make sure packages work correctly. This can be done manually or via the package testing pipeline. You have to make sure the packages are already published by OBS before this step. It should prompt you for variables to be passed to the pipeline:

  BRANCH="<kata-branch-to-release>"
  NEW_VERSION=<the-version-you-expect-to-be-packaged|latest>
  

  Note: latest will verify that a package provides the latest Kata tag in that branch.

Create release notes

We have a script in place in the packaging repository to create release notes that include a short-log of the commits across Kata components.

Run the script as shown below:

$ cd ${GOPATH}/src/github.com/kata-containers/packaging/release
# Note: OLD_VERSION is where the script should start to get changes.
$ ./runtime-release-notes.sh ${OLD_VERSION} ${NEW_VERSION} > notes.md
# Edit the `notes.md` file to review and make any changes to the release notes.
# Add the release notes in GitHub runtime.
$ hub -C "${GOPATH}/src/github.com/kata-containers/runtime" release edit -F notes.md "${NEW_VERSION}"

Announce the release

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