If you are using a released version of Kubernetes, you should refer to the docs that go with that version.
The latest release of this document can be found [here](http://releases.k8s.io/release-1.1/docs/devel/releasing.md).Documentation for other releases can be found at releases.k8s.io.
This document explains how to cut a release, and the theory behind it. If you just want to cut a release and move on with your life, you can stop reading after the first section.
Regardless of whether you are cutting a major or minor version, cutting a release breaks down into four pieces:
- selecting release components;
- cutting/branching the release;
- building and pushing the binaries; and
- publishing binaries and release notes.
You should progress in this strict order.
First, figure out what kind of release you're doing, what branch you're cutting from, and other prerequisites.
- Alpha releases (
vX.Y.0-alpha.W
) are cut directly frommaster
.- Alpha releases don't require anything besides green tests, (see below).
- Beta releases (
vX.Y.Z-beta.W
) are cut from their respective release branch,release-X.Y
.- Make sure all necessary cherry picks have been resolved. You should ensure that all outstanding cherry picks have been reviewed and merged and the branch validated on Jenkins. See Cherry Picks for more information on how to manage cherry picks prior to cutting the release.
- Beta releases also require green tests, (see below).
- Official releases (
vX.Y.Z
) are cut from their respective release branch,release-X.Y
.- Official releases should be similar or identical to their respective beta releases, so have a look at the cherry picks that have been merged since the beta release and question everything you find.
- Official releases also require green tests, (see below).
- New release series are also cut directly from
master
.- This is a big deal! If you're reading this doc for the first time, you probably shouldn't be doing this release, and should talk to someone on the release team.
- New release series cut a new release branch,
release-X.Y
, off ofmaster
, and also release the first beta in the series,vX.Y.0-beta.0
. - Every change in the
vX.Y
series from this point on will have to be cherry picked, so be sure you want to do this before proceeding. - You should still look for green tests, (see below).
No matter what you're cutting, you're going to want to look at Jenkins. Figure out what branch you're cutting from, (see above,) and look at the critical jobs building from that branch. First glance through builds and look for nice solid rows of green builds, and then check temporally with the other critical builds to make sure they're solid around then as well.
If you're doing an alpha release or cutting a new release series, you can choose an arbitrary build. If you are doing an official release, you have to release from HEAD of the branch, (because you have to do some version-rev commits,) so choose the latest build on the release branch. (Remember, that branch should be frozen.)
Once you find some greens, you can find the build hash for a build by looking at
the Full Console Output and searching for build_version=
. You should see a line:
build_version=v1.2.0-alpha.2.164+b44c7d79d6c9bb
Or, if you're cutting from a release branch (i.e. doing an official release),
build_version=v1.1.0-beta.567+d79d6c9bbb44c7
Please note that build_version
was called githash
versions prior to v1.2.
Because Jenkins builds frequently, if you're looking between jobs
(e.g. kubernetes-e2e-gke-ci
and kubernetes-e2e-gce
), there may be no single
build_version
that's been run on both jobs. In that case, take the a green
kubernetes-e2e-gce
build (but please check that it corresponds to a temporally
similar build that's green on kubernetes-e2e-gke-ci
). Lastly, if you're having
trouble understanding why the GKE continuous integration clusters are failing
and you're trying to cut a release, don't hesitate to contact the GKE
oncall.
Before proceeding to the next step:
export BUILD_VERSION=v1.2.0-alpha.2.164+b44c7d79d6c9bb
Where v1.2.0-alpha.2.164+b44c7d79d6c9bb
is the build hash you decided on. This
will become your release point.
You'll need the latest version of the releasing tools:
git clone git@github.com:kubernetes/kubernetes.git
cd kubernetes
or git fetch upstream && git checkout upstream/master
from an existing repo.
Decide what version you're cutting and export it:
- alpha release:
export RELEASE_VERSION="vX.Y.0-alpha.W"
; - beta release:
export RELEASE_VERSION="vX.Y.Z-beta.W"
; - official release:
export RELEASE_VERSION="vX.Y.Z"
; - new release series:
export RELEASE_VERSION="vX.Y"
.
Then, run
./release/cut-official-release.sh "${RELEASE_VERSION}" "${BUILD_VERSION}"
This will do a dry run of the release. It will give you instructions at the
end for pushd
ing into the dry-run directory and having a look around.
pushd
into the directory and make sure everythig looks as you expect:
git log "${RELEASE_VERSION}" # do you see the commit you expect?
make release
./cluster/kubectl.sh version -c
If you're satisfied with the result of the script, go back to upstream/master
run
./release/cut-official-release.sh "${RELEASE_VERSION}" "${BUILD_VERSION}" --no-dry-run
and follow the instructions.
The script you ran above will prompt you to take any remaining steps to push
tars, and will also give you a template for the release notes. Compose an
email to the team with the template, and use build/make-release-notes.sh
and/or release-notes/release-notes.go
in
kubernetes/contrib to make the release
notes, (see #17444 for more info).
- Alpha release:
- Figure out what the PR numbers for this release and last release are, and get an api-token from GitHub (https://github.com/settings/tokens). From a clone of kubernetes/contrib at upstream/master, go run release-notes/release-notes.go --last-release-pr= --current-release-pr= --api-token= Feel free to prune.
- Beta release:
- Only publish a beta release if it's a standalone pre-release. (We create
beta tags after we do official releases to maintain proper semantic
versioning, we don't publish these beta releases.) Use
./hack/cherry_pick_list.sh ${RELEASE_VERSION}
to get release notes for such a release.
- Only publish a beta release if it's a standalone pre-release. (We create
beta tags after we do official releases to maintain proper semantic
versioning, we don't publish these beta releases.) Use
- Official release:
- From your clone of upstream/master, run
./hack/cherry_pick_list.sh ${RELEASE_VERSION}
to get the release notes for the patch release you just created. Feel free to prune anything internal, but typically for patch releases we tend to include everything in the release notes. - If this is a first official release (vX.Y.0), look through the release notes for all of the alpha releases since the last cycle, and include anything important in release notes.
- From your clone of upstream/master, run
Send the email out, letting people know these are the draft release notes. If
they want to change anything, they should update the appropriate PRs with the
release-note
label.
When we're ready to announce the release, create a GitHub release:
- pick the appropriate tag;
- check "This is a pre-release" if it's an alpha or beta release;
- fill in the release title from the draft;
- re-run the appropriate release notes tool(s) to pick up any changes people have made;
- find the appropriate
kubernetes.tar.gz
in [GCS bucket](https:// console.developers.google.com/storage/browser/kubernetes-release/release/), download it, double check the hash (compare to what you had in the release notes draft), and attach it to the release; and - publish!
Please note that this information may be out of date. The scripts are the authoritative source on how version injection works.
Kubernetes may be built from either a git tree (using hack/build-go.sh
) or
from a tarball (using either hack/build-go.sh
or go install
) or directly by
the Go native build system (using go get
).
When building from git, we want to be able to insert specific information about
the build tree at build time. In particular, we want to use the output of git describe
to generate the version of Kubernetes and the status of the build
tree (add a -dirty
prefix if the tree was modified.)
When building from a tarball or using the Go build system, we will not have access to the information about the git tree, but we still want to be able to tell whether this build corresponds to an exact release (e.g. v0.3) or is between releases (e.g. at some point in development between v0.3 and v0.4).
In order to cover the different build cases, we start by providing information that can be used when using only Go build tools or when we do not have the git version information available.
To be able to provide a meaningful version in those cases, we set the contents of variables in a Go source file that will be used when no overrides are present.
We are using pkg/version/base.go
as the source of versioning in absence of
information from git. Here is a sample of that file's contents:
var (
gitVersion string = "v0.4-dev" // version from git, output of $(git describe)
gitCommit string = "" // sha1 from git, output of $(git rev-parse HEAD)
)
This means a build with go install
or go get
or a build from a tarball will
yield binaries that will identify themselves as v0.4-dev
and will not be able
to provide you with a SHA1.
To add the extra versioning information when building from git, the
hack/build-go.sh
script will gather that information (using git describe
and
git rev-parse
) and then create a -ldflags
string to pass to go install
and
tell the Go linker to override the contents of those variables at build time. It
can, for instance, tell it to override gitVersion
and set it to
v0.4-13-g4567bcdef6789-dirty
and set gitCommit
to 4567bcdef6789...
which
is the complete SHA1 of the (dirty) tree used at build time.