This document describes our release process, and contains the steps to be followed by an OpenZeppelin maintainer at the several stages of a release.
We release a new version of OpenZeppelin monthly. Release cycles are tracked in the issue milestones.
Each release has at least one release candidate published first, intended for community review and any critical fixes that may come out of it. At the moment we leave 1 week between the first release candidate and the final release.
Before starting make sure to verify the following items.
- Your local
master
branch is in sync with yourupstream
remote (it may have another name depending on your setup). - Your repo is clean, particularly with no untracked files in the contracts and tests directories. Verify with
git clean -n
.
We'll refer to a release vX.Y.Z
.
git checkout master
git checkout -b release-vX.Y.Z
Once in the release branch, change the version string in package.json
, package-lock.json
and ethpm.json
to X.Y.Z-rc.R
. (This will be X.Y.Z-rc.1
for the first release candidate.) Commit these changes and tag the commit as vX.Y.Z-rc.R
.
git add package.json package-lock.json ethpm.json
git commit -m "Release candidate vX.Y.Z-rc.R"
git tag -a vX.Y.Z-rc.R
git push upstream release-vX.Y.Z
git push upstream vX.Y.Z-rc.R
Draft the release notes in our GitHub releases. Make sure to mark it as a pre-release! Try to be consistent with our previous release notes in the title and format of the text. Release candidates don't need a detailed changelog, but make sure to include a link to GitHub's compare page.
Once the CI run for the new tag is green, publish on npm under the next
tag. You should see the contracts compile automatically.
npm publish --tag next
Publish the release notes on GitHub and the forum, and ask our community manager to announce the release candidate on at least Twitter.
Make sure to have the latest changes from upstream
in your local release branch.
git checkout release-vX.Y.Z
git pull upstream
Before starting the release process, make one final commit to CHANGELOG.md, including the date of the release.
Change the version string in package.json
, package-lock.json
and ethpm.json
removing the "-rc.R" suffix. Commit these changes and tag the commit as vX.Y.Z
.
git add package.json package-lock.json ethpm.json
git commit -m "Release vX.Y.Z"
git tag -a vX.Y.Z
git push upstream release-vX.Y.Z
git push upstream vX.Y.Z
Draft the release notes in GitHub releases. Try to be consistent with our previous release notes in the title and format of the text. Make sure to include a detailed changelog.
Once the CI run for the new tag is green, publish on npm. You should see the contracts compile automatically.
npm publish
Publish the release notes on GitHub and ask our community manager to announce the release!
Delete the next
tag in the npm package as there is no longer a release candidate.
npm dist-tag rm --otp $2FA_CODE @openzeppelin/contracts next
After the final release, the release branch should be merged back into master
. This merge must not be squashed because it would lose the tagged release commit. Since the GitHub repo is set up to only allow squashed merges, the merge should be done locally and pushed.
Make sure to have the latest changes from upstream
in your local release branch.
git checkout release-vX.Y.Z
git pull upstream
git checkout master
git merge --no-ff release-vX.Y.Z
git push upstream master
The release branch can then be deleted on GitHub.