neo-go/docs/release-instruction.md

Release instructions

This document outlines the neo-go release process. It can be used as a todo list for a new release.

Pre-release checks

These should run successfully:

• build
• unit-tests
• lint
• privnet with consensus nodes

Writing CHANGELOG

Add an entry to the CHANGELOG.md following the style established there. Add a codename, version and release date in the heading. Write a paragraph describing the most significant changes done in this release. Then, add sections with new features implemented and bugs fixed describing each change in detail and with a reference to Github issues. Add generic improvements section for changes that are not directly visible to the node end-user, such as performance optimizations, refactoring and API changes. Add a "Behaviour changes" section if there are any incompatible changes in default settings or the way commands operate.

Updating ROADMAP

Update ROADMAP.md if necessary.

Tag the release

Use vX.Y.Z tag following the semantic versioning standard.

Push changes and release tag to Github

This step should bypass the default PR mechanism to get a correct result (so that releasing requires admin privileges for the project). Both the master branch update and the tag must be pushed simultaneously like this:

$ git push origin master v0.70.1

This is important to ensure proper version in a CI-built binary. Wait for CircleCI to build it (or them if we're to have more than one OS or architecture), download it and rename to neo-go-$OS-$ARCH, at the moment that should be neo-go-linux-amd64.

Make a proper Github release

Edit an automatically-created release on Github, copy things from changelog there and attach previously downloaded binary. Make a release.

Close Github milestone

Close corresponding X.Y.Z Github milestone.

Announcements

Copy the github release page link to:

• Discord channel
• Riot channel

Deployment

Deploy the updated version to the mainnet/testnet.

Post-release

The first commit after the release must be tagged with X.Y.Z+1-pre tag for proper semantic-versioned builds. So, it's good to make some minor documentation update after the release and push it with this new tag.