A maintainer's guide to releasing Docker

So you‘re in charge of a Docker release? Cool. Here’s what to do.

If your experience deviates from this document, please document the changes to keep it up-to-date.

1. Pull from master and create a release branch

git checkout master
git pull
git checkout -b bump_$VERSION

2. Update CHANGELOG.md

You can run this command for reference:

LAST_VERSION=$(git tag | grep -E "v[0-9\.]+$" | sort -nr | head -n 1)
git log $LAST_VERSION..HEAD

Each change should be formatted as BULLET CATEGORY: DESCRIPTION

  • BULLET is either -, + or *, to indicate a bugfix, new feature or upgrade, respectively.

  • CATEGORY should describe which part of the project is affected. Valid categories are:

    • Builder
    • Documentation
    • Hack
    • Packaging
    • Remote API
    • Runtime

  • DESCRIPTION: a concise description of the change that is relevant to the end-user, using the present tense. Changes should be described in terms of how they affect the user, for example “new feature X which allows Y”, “fixed bug which caused X”, “increased performance of Y”.

EXAMPLES:

+ Builder: 'docker build -t FOO' applies the tag FOO to the newly built
  container.
* Runtime: improve detection of kernel version
- Remote API: fix a bug in the optional unix socket transport

3. Change the contents of the VERSION file

4. Run all tests

FIXME

5. Commit and create a pull request to the “release” branch

git add CHANGELOG.md
git commit -m "Bump version to $VERSION"
git push origin bump_$VERSION

6. Get 2 other maintainers to validate the pull request

7. Merge the pull request and apply tags

git checkout release
git merge bump_$VERSION
git tag -a v$VERSION # Don't forget the v!
git tag -f -a latest
git push
git push --tags

8. Publish binaries

To run this you will need access to the release credentials. Get them from the infrastructure maintainers.

docker build -t docker .
docker run  \
	-e AWS_S3_BUCKET=get-nightly.docker.io \
	-e AWS_ACCESS_KEY=$(cat ~/.aws/access_key) \
	-e AWS_SECRET_KEY=$(cat ~/.aws/secret_key) \
	-e GPG_PASSPHRASE=supersecretsesame \
	docker
	hack/release.sh

It will build and upload the binaries on the specified bucket (you should use get-nightly.docker.io for general testing, and once everything is fine, switch to get.docker.io).

9. Rejoice!

Congratulations! You're done.