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Release process for Nickel

You're ready to release a new version of Nickel - congrats!

This document explains how to do so step by step while keeping the various crates and dependent repositories (such as the website) in a consistent state.

Steps to make a release

Releasing script

IMPORTANT: Since the 1.4 release, scripts/release.sh takes care of bumping versions numbers, updating local cross-dependencies, creating a clean release branch, updating the stable branch and publishing to crates.io.

The covered steps are still described below for your information, but you shouldn't need to actually perform them manually.

You'll still have to do the GitHub release, redeploy nickel-lang.org manually, and backport changes to master, which are all described below as well.

Script requirements

  • A relatively recent bash (> 4.3)
  • git
  • tomlq
  • cargo
  • You will need to be signed in to crates.io with a GitHub account that is part of the Nickel Core team, and have a crates.io API key saved locally on your machine (normally via cargo login). For help with this, contact the Nickel maintainers.

Once master is in a releasable state, start the script from the root of the nickel git repository with an argument that is either major, minor or patch, indicating how to bump the version number. For example:

$./release.sh minor
++ Nickel release script
++
++ This script will:
[..]

About the version numbers

Some of the crates in the Nickel workspace are libraries which are not versioned according to the version number of the language itself. These are

  • nickel-lang-core
  • nickel-lang-utils
  • lsp-harness
  • nickel-wasm-repl

Their version numbers take the form 0.W.U and their public APIs are not considered stable. Consequently we bump their versions to 0.(W+1).0 on every release (if needed).

Other crates carry the version number of the Nickel language. These are

  • nickel-lang-cli
  • nickel-lang-lsp
  • pyckel

Prepare

IMPORTANT: this section is covered by the release.sh script, and is only kept for information purpose. Usually, you shouldn't have to perform the following steps manually.

  1. Branch out from master to a dedicated branch X.Y.Z-release: git checkout -b X.Y.Z-release

  2. Bump the overall workspace version number in Cargo.toml to X.Y.Z. This will be automatically propagated to the CLI, the Nickel language server and Pyckel.

  3. Update the current version number mentioned in doc/manual/introduction.md with the new one set in step 2. Grep for the previous version number in the various README files, as the latest version is sometimes mentioned, and update if needed.

  4. Bump the version number of core in core/Cargo.toml and wasm-repl/Cargo.toml. The two versions must always be the same.

    Bump the version of the other crates in the workspace if needed (usually, it's safer to always bump the version of core because it's modified all the time without special care about its public API, but the following crates are often left untouched):

    • lsp/lsp-harness/Cargo.toml
    • utils/Cargo.toml

    Afterwards, also adjust the version numbers of the dependencies in Cargo.toml. For example, in

       nickel-lang-core = { version = "0.1", path = "./core", default-features = false }

    adjust the version 0.1 to reflect the new version number.

  5. Make sure that everything builds: run nix flake check at the root of the repository.

  6. Add the changelog since the last release in RELEASES.md. GitHub is able to automatically generate release notes: refer to this guide. While the output needs to be reworked, it's a useful starting point. Commit and push your changes.

  7. Set the stable branch to point to your new X.Y.Z-release. Because the stable branch usually contains specific fixes, or cherry-picked commits, we'll have to force push. First save the previous state in a local branch:

    git checkout stable
git branch stable-local-save

    Update the stable branch:

    git checkout stable
git reset --hard X.Y.Z-release`
git push --force-with-lease

    If anything goes wrong, you can reset stable to its previous state:

    git checkout stable
git reset --hard stable-local-save
git push --force-with-lease

Release on crates.io

IMPORTANT: this section is covered by the release.sh script, and is only kept for information purpose. Usually, you shouldn't have to perform the following steps manually.

  1. Remove references to nickel-lang-utils from the [dev-dependencies] sections of the crates to be published: ./core/Cargo.toml for nickel-lang-core, ./cli/Cargo.toml for nickel-lang-cli and ./lsp/nls/Cargo.toml for nickel-lang-lsp (work-around for cargo:#4242.

  2. Remove references to lsp-harness from the [dev-dependencies] sections of the ./lsp/nls/Cargo.toml (workaround for the same issue as 1.).

  3. For all crates to be published, remove the format feature from the list of features (in the [features] section of their Cargo.toml file), remove all dependencies referenced by format (of the form dep:xxx) from the list of dependencies of the crate, and finally, remove "format" from the list of the default features.

    We have to do this because Topiary isn't published on crates.io yet, but cargo insists that we only depend on published crates. Thus, we have to abandon the format feature - which requires Topiary - for the version published to crates.io.

  4. Commit the changes made in 1., 2. and 3. temporarily to please cargo, but they will be dropped later. Do not push.

  5. Check that a dry run of cargo publish succeeds on the crates to be published (nickel-lang-core, nickel-lang-cli and nickel-lang-lsp):

    • cargo publish -p nickel-lang-core --dry-run
    • cargo publish -p nickel-lang-cli --dry-run
    • cargo publish -p nickel-lang-lsp --dry-run

    For this to work, you will need to be signed in to crates.io with a GitHub account that is part of the Nickel Core team, and have a crates.io API key saved locally on your machine (normally via cargo login). For help with this, contact the Nickel maintainers.

  6. Actually release nickel-lang-core, nickel-lang-cli and nickel-lang-lsp (in that order, as the cli and the lsp depend on core) on crates.io: cargo publish -p <crate-to-publish>

  7. Ditch the potential changes made to the cargo manifests at steps 1., 2. and 3. by dropping the corresponding commit

Release on GitHub

  1. Do the release on GitHub, Make sure that you set X.Y.Z-release as the target branch and have GitHub create the X.Y.Z tag on release.

  2. Verify that the "Upload release artifacts" GitHub action is getting triggered and completes successfully, uploading a static Nickel binary and a Docker image for both x86-64 and arm64 Linux platforms.

Redeploy nickel-lang.org with the new release

  1. Checkout the nickel-lang repository.

  2. Branch out from master and update the Nickel input:

    git checkout -b release/X.Y.Z
nix flake lock --update-input nickel
git add flake.lock
git commit -m "Update to Nickel vX.Y.Z"
git push -u origin @

    Open a pull request on the nickel-lang repository. Once the CI is green and the PR is merged, nickel-lang.org will be automatically redeployed with the new version of Nickel used for the playground and the documentation.

Port changes to master

  1. Cherry-pick the following commits into separate PRs to master:
    • Bumping the version numbers done in Preparation 2.
    • Updating release notes done in Preparation 5.
    • Fixes that you made locally for nix flake check or other commands.
  2. Profit!