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Releasing Brigade

Releasing Brigade is easy and mostly automated.

This section exists primarily for the benefit of project maintainers and outlines, in brief, the Brigade release process.

⚠️  These steps are also generally applicable to other projects owned by the @brigadecore GitHub org.

Releasing Server-Side Components

Pre-Release

To prepare for a release, a project maintainer must open a PR containing “pre-release version bumps.” Such a PR should update all references to the version number of the latest Brigade release so that they instead reflect the version number of the upcoming Brigade release.

⚠️  These are primarily, but not exclusively documentation updates.

The PR should be reviewed and signed off upon by another project maintainer.

Merging these changes prior to tagging a new release with a semantic version number ensures that the commit referenced by the new tag contains documentation that correctly references that same release. Since documentation is continuously deployed, it is also crucial that such changes not be merged too far in advance of a planned release, as the result will be that documentation will reference a version of the software that does not yet exist, and this can confuse new users.

⚠️  This entire step can optionally be skipped when planning a “pre-release,” such as a release candidate if the maintainers do not desire for live documentation to be updated such that the release candidate is presented as the latest version of Brigade.

Creating the Release

Brigade’s automated release process is triggered by the creation of a new release (or pre-release) in GitHub, which must also reference a tag that adheres to semantic versioning practices. It is insufficient to only apply a tag. The creation of the GitHub release is the actual trigger for Brigade’s release automation.

To create a release:

  1. Validate that the CI process has completed successfully on the main branch after the pre-release version bumps have been merged.

  2. Browse to https://github.com/brigadecore/brigade/releases/new.

  3. Click Choose a tag and type the semantic version number of the release. This tag does not exist yet, so click the button that will appear that says Create new tag on publish.

  4. Use the semantic version number as the release title.

  5. If applicable check the box specifying This is a pre-release. Until such time that work a major revision of Brigade (v3) begins (and there are currently no plans for this), this is only applicable to release candidates.

  6. Click Publish release.

Automated processes will complete the release.

Automated Release Process

The automated release process does the following:

  1. Builds amd64 and arm64-based Docker images of all Brigade server-side components, cryptographically signs those images, and pushes them to each component’s canonical OCI repository. (These repositories are hosted on Docker Hub.)

  2. Generates an SBOM (software bill of materials) for each image and publishes it to the corresponding GitHub release page.

  3. Publishes a Helm chart to a canonical OCI repository. (This repository is hosted on ghcr.io)

  4. Builds the brig CLI for a variety of OSes and CPU architectures and publishes the pre-built binaries to the GitHub release page.

  5. Publishes Brigadier (the library used for writing Brigade scripts) to npmjs.com. This step is last because it is the only one that is not strictly idempotent.

Post-Release

Following a release, it is optional, but recommended to open a second PR that updates all example scripts which make use of Brigadier such that they use the latest (just released) version.

Releasing the Brigade SDK for Go

Source for the Brigade SDK for Go is housed in the same repository as the Brigade server side components. This was a deliberate choice so that features requiring enhancements to both the SDK and the API server would not require coordination across multiple repositories.

Despite its source being housed in the same repository, Brigade SDK for Go is versioned independently of Brigade’s server-side components.

To cut a release of the SDK, all that is required is for the appropriate commit in the canonical repository to be tagged with a semantic version number. There is no automation involved because the existence of the tag is all that is required for Go’s module system to be able to locate a given version of the SDK.