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Creating a release

GitHub

You can create a new release on GitHub.

Enter the tag version that month, i.e for September 2016 you would enter 201609.

Enter a title, we usually use August 2016 Release

Enter a placeholder for the body, we will edit this later.

Create changelog

For this, we assume you are using the master branch to create the release against.

We now generate the changelog using the GitHub API itself so it shouldn't matter what state your local branch is in so long as it has the code to generate the changelog itself.

Using the GitHub API means we can use the labels associated with merged pull requests to categorise the changelog. We also then record who made the pull request to thank them in the changelog itself.

You will be asked for a GitHub personal access token. You can generate this here. No permissions should be needed so just give it a name and click Generate Token. You can then export the token as an environment variable GH_TOKEN or place it in your .env file.

The basic command to run is by using artisan. Here you pass new tag (1.41) and previous tag (1.40). For further help run php artisan release:tag --help. This will generate a changelog up to the latest master branch, if you want it to be done against something else then pass the latest pull request number with --pr $PR_NUMBER.

php artisan release:tag 1.41 1.40
  • Now commit and push the change that has been made to doc/General/Changelog.md.
  • Once the pull request has been merged in for the Changelog, you can create a new release on GitHub.
  • Create two threads on the community site:
  • A changelog thread example
  • An info thread example
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