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Overarching Process

Tina has three main branches:

• master: The bleeding edge of tinacms
• next: A preview of the next release
• latest: The current stable release

The flow of changes therefore looks like:

fix-some-bug => master => next => latest

The process happens over a week:

• On Monday
  1. next is merged into latest; then latest is published to npm
  2. master is merged into next; then next is published to npm
• Any hot fixes for bugs will be cherry picked into next and latest and the published accordingly.
• Every pull request merged to master automatically triggers a canary release.

With this process:

• all accepted changes are available as canary releases for early testing
• critical fixes are published as soon as possible
• new features and minor fixes take ~1.5 weeks to be published

Steps to Release

The general release process looks like this:

1. Build the source files:
   The source must be compiled, minified, and uglified in preparation for release.
2. Generate CHANGELOGs and Git tags:
   We use lerna to generate CHANGELOG files automatically from our commit messages.
3. Clean the CHANGELOGs
   Lerna sometimes adds empty changelog entries. For example, if react-tinacms is changed then tinacms will get get a patch update with only the dependency updated. Make sure to install lerna-clean-changelog-cli:
   npm i -g lerna-clean-changelogs-cli
4. Publish to NPM:
   You must have an NPM_TOKEN set locally that has access to the @tinacms organization
5. Push CHANGELOGs and Git tags to GitHub:
   Let everyone know!

The exact commands vary slightly depending on the type of release being made.

Prerelease

1. Build the source files:
   npm run build
2. Generate CHANGELOGs and Git tags:
   lerna version \ --conventional-commits \ --conventional-prerelease \ --no-push \ --allow-branch next \ -m "chore(publish): prerelease"
3. Clean the CHANGELOGs
   lcc ** && git commit -am "chore: clean changelogs"
4. Publish to NPM: lerna publish from-package --dist-tag next
5. Push CHANGELOGs and Git tags to GitHub: git push && git push --tags

Graduating Prereleases

1. Build the source files:
   npm run build
2. Generate CHANGELOGs and Git tags:
   lerna version \ --conventional-commits \ --conventional-graduate \ --no-push \ --allow-branch next \ -m "chore(publish): graduation"
3. Clean the CHANGELOGs
   lcc ** && git commit -am "chore: clean changelogs"
4. Publish to NPM:
   lerna publish from-package
5. Push CHANGELOGs and Git tags to GitHub: git push && git push --tags

Release

1. Build the source files:
   npm run build
2. Generate CHANGELOGs and Git tags:
   lerna version \ --conventional-commits \ --no-push \ --allow-branch master \ -m "chore(publish): release"
3. Clean the CHANGELOGs
   lcc ** && git commit -am "chore: clean changelogs"
4. Publish to NPM: lerna publish from-package
5. Push CHANGELOGs and Git tags to GitHub: git push && git push --tags