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Releasing Rails

In this document, we'll cover the steps necessary to release Rails. Each section contains steps to take during that time before the release. The times suggested in each header are just that: suggestions. However, they should really be considered as minimums.

10 Days before release

Today is mostly coordination tasks. Here are the things you must do today:

Is the CI green? If not, make it green. (See "Fixing the CI")

Do not release with a Red CI. You can find the CI status here:

https://buildkite.com/rails/rails

Do we have any Git dependencies? If so, contact those authors.

Having Git dependencies indicates that we depend on unreleased code. Obviously Rails cannot be released when it depends on unreleased code. Contact the authors of those particular gems and work out a release date that suits them.

Announce your plans to the rest of the team on Basecamp

Let them know of your plans to release.

Update each CHANGELOG.

Many times commits are made without the CHANGELOG being updated. You should review the commits since the last release, and fill in any missing information for each CHANGELOG.

You can review the commits for the 3.0.10 release like this:

[aaron@higgins rails (3-0-10)]$ git log v3.0.9..

If you're doing a stable branch release, you should also ensure that all of the CHANGELOG entries in the stable branch are also synced to the main branch.

Day of release

If making multiple releases. Publish them in order from oldest to newest, to ensure that the "greatest" version also shows up in npm and GitHub Releases as "latest".

Put the new version in the RAILS_VERSION file.

Include an RC number if appropriate, e.g. 6.0.0.rc1.

Build and test the gem.

Run rake install to generate the gems and install them locally. You can now use the version installed locally to generate a new app and check if everything is working as expected.

This will stop you from looking silly when you push an RC to rubygems.org and then realize it is broken.

Check credentials for GitHub

For GitHub run gh auth status to check that you are logged in (run gh login if not).

The release task will sign the release tag. If you haven't got commit signing set up, use https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Signing-Your-Work as a guide. You can generate keys with the GPG suite from here: https://gpgtools.org.

Run rake prep_release to prepare the release. This will populate the gemspecs and npm package.json with the current RAILS_VERSION, add the header to the CHANGELOGs, build the gems, and check if bundler can resolve the dependencies.

You can now inspect the results in the diff and see if you are happy with the changes.

To release, Run rake release. This will commit the changes, tag it, and create a GitHub release with the proper release notes in draft mode.

Open the corresponding GitHub release draft and check that the release notes are correct. If everything is fine, publish the release.

Publish the gems

To publish the gems approve the Release workflow in GitHub Actions, that was created after the release was published.

Send Rails release announcements

Write a release announcement that includes the version, changes, and links to GitHub where people can find the specific commit list. Here are the mailing lists where you should announce:

Use Markdown format for your announcement. Remember to ask people to report issues with the release candidate to the rails-core mailing list.

NOTE: For patch releases, there's a rake announce task to generate the release post. It supports multiple patch releases too:

VERSIONS="5.0.5.rc1,5.1.3.rc1" rake announce

IMPORTANT: If any users experience regressions when using the release candidate, you must postpone the release. Bugfix releases should not break existing applications.

Post the announcement to the Rails blog.

The blog at https://rubyonrails.org/blog is built from https://github.com/rails/website.

Create a file named like _posts/$(date +'%F')-Rails-<versions>-have-been-released.markdown

Add YAML frontmatter

---
layout: post
title: 'Rails <VERSIONS> have been released!'
categories: releases
author: <your handle>
published: true
date: <YYYY-MM-DD or `date +%F`>
---

Use the markdown generated by rake announce earlier as a base for the post. Add some context for users as to the purpose of this release (bugfix/security).

If this is a part of the latest release series, update _data/version.yml so that the homepage points to the latest version.

Post the announcement to the Rails X account.

Security releases

Emailing the Rails security announce list

Email the security announce list once for each vulnerability fixed.

You can do this, or ask the security team to do it.

Email the security reports to:

Be sure to note the security fixes in your announcement along with CVE numbers and links to each patch. Some people may not be able to upgrade right away, so we need to give them the security fixes in patch form.

  • Blog announcements
  • X announcements
  • Merge the release branch to the stable branch
  • Drink beer (or other cocktail)

Misc

Fixing the CI

There are two simple steps for fixing the CI:

  1. Identify the problem
  2. Fix it

Repeat these steps until the CI is green.