Rolling a Release

Below is the process used for creating and publishing a release of OpenLMIS 3.x. These steps are being documented for 3.0 Beta, and this page should be used and updated for 3.0, 3.1, and subsequent 3.x releases.

Goals

What's the purpose of publishing a release? It gives us a specific version of the software for the community to test drive and review. Beta releases will be deployed with demo data to the UAT site (uat.openlmis.org). That will be a public, visible URL that will stay the same while stakeholders test drive it. It will also have demo data and will not be automatically wiped and updated each time a new Git commit is made.

Prerequisites

Before you tag and publish the release, make sure the following are in place:

• Demo data and seed data: make sure you have demo data that is sufficient to demonstrate the features of this release. Your demo data might be built into the repositories and used in the build process OR be prepared to run a one-time database load script/command.
• Features are completed for this release and are checked in.
• All automated tests pass.
• Release notes and other documentation/publicity is ready for distribution.
• The Release Manager has certifications for remote UAT environment and a docker client installed on the machine he or she will be releasing to.
  
  

Steps

When you are ready to create and publish a release (Note that version modifiers should not be used in these steps - e.g. SNAPSHOT):

1. Select a tag name such as '3.0.0-beta' based on the OpenLMIS Releases guidelines in the wiki.
2. The service utility library should be released prior to the Services.  Publishing to the central repository may take some time, so publish at least a few hours before building and publishing the released Services:
   1. Update the serviceVersion of GitHub's openlmis-service-util
   2. Check Jenkins built it successfully
   3. At Nexus Repository Manager, login and navigate to Staging Repositories.  In the list scroll till you find orgopenlmis-NNNN.  This is the staged release.
   4. Close the repository, if this succeeds, release it.  More information.
   5. Wait 1-2 hours for the released artifact to be available on Maven Central.  Search here to check:  https://search.maven.org/
   6. In each OpenLMIS Service's build.gradle, update the dependency version of the library to point to the released version of the library (e.g. drop 'SNAPSHOT')
3. In each service, set the serviceVersion property in the gradle.properties file to the version you've chosen.  Tag this commit with that same version and push to GitHub.  Note that GitHub release tags should start with the letter "v", so '3.0.0-beta' would be tagged 'v3.0.0-beta'.  Also, when you create the version in GitHub check the "This is a pre-release" checkbox if indeed that is true.  Do this for each service/UI module in the project, including the API services and the AngularJS UI repo (note: in that repo, the file is called version.properties, not gradle.properties).  DON'T update the Reference Distribution yet.
   
   1. Do we need a release branch? For the 3.0 Beta release, we do not need a release branch, only a tag. If there are any later fixes we need to apply to the 3.0 Beta, we would issue a new beta release (eg, 3.0 Beta R1) to publish additional, specific fixes.
   2. Do we need a code freeze? We do not need a "code freeze" process. We will add the tag in Git, and everyone can keep committing further work on master as usual. Updates to master will be automatically built and deployed at the Test site (test.openlmis.org), but not the UAT site (uat.openlmis.org).
   3. Confirm that your release tags appear in GitHub and in Docker Hub.
      
      1. Look under the Releases tab of each repository, eg https://github.com/OpenLMIS/openlmis-requisition/releases.
      2. Look under Tags in each Docker Hub repository.  e.g. https://hub.docker.com/r/openlmis/requisition/tags/  .   You'll need to wait for the Jenkins jobs to complete and be succesfull so give this a few minutes.
         Note: After tagging each service, you may also want to change the serviceVersion again so that future commits are tagged on Docker Hub with a different tag. For example, after releasing '3.1.0' you may want to change the serviceVersion to '3.2.0-SNAPSHOT'.
4. In openlmis-config, tag the most recent commit with the tag version (including the 'v').
5. Update docker-compose.yml in openlmis-ref-distro with the release chosen
   1. For each of the services deployed as a the new version on DockerHub, update the version in the docker-compose.yml file to the version you're releasing. See the lines under "services:" → serviceName → "image: openlmis/requisition-refui:3.0.0-beta-SNAPSHOT" and change that last part to the new version tag for each service.
   2. Commit this change and tag the openlmis-ref-distro repo with the release being made.
6. Update docker-compose.yml in openlmis-deployment for the UAT deployment script with the release chosen which is at https://github.com/OpenLMIS/openlmis-deployment/blob/master/deployment/uat_env/docker-compose.yml
   
   1. For each of the services deployed as a the new version on DockerHub, update the version in the docker-compose.yml file to the version you're releasing.
   2. Commit this change. (You do not need to tag this repo because it is only used by Jenkins, not external users.)
7. Kick off each *-deploy-to-uat Jobs on Jenkins
   1. Wait about 1 minute between starting each job
   2. Confirm UAT has the deployed service.  e.g. for the auth service:  http://uat.openlmis.org/auth  check that the version is the one chosen.
8. Load demo data manually into UAT host's postgres container
9. Navigate to uat.openlmis.org and ensure it works
   
   

Once all these steps are completed and verified, the release process is complete. At this point you can conduct communication tasks such as sharing the URL and Release Announcement to stakeholders. Congratulations!