opentelemetry-java-instrumentation/RELEASING.md

Versioning and releasing

OpenTelemetry Auto-Instrumentation for Java uses SemVer standard for versioning of its artifacts.

The version is specified in version.gradle.kts.

Snapshot builds

Every successful CI build of the main branch automatically executes ./gradlew publishToSonatype as the last step, which publishes a snapshot build to Sonatype OSS snapshots repository.

Starting the Release

Before making the release:

• Merge a PR to main updating the CHANGELOG.md

• Create a release branch, e.g. v1.9.x

  git checkout -b v1.9.x upstream/main
  git push upstream v1.9.x
  

• Merge a PR to the release branch with the following changes

  • Remove -SNAPSHOT from the version in these files:
  • version.gradle.kts
  • examples/distro/build.gradle
  • examples/extension/build.gradle
  • Bump the version in the download link in the root README.md file

Open the release build workflow in your browser here.

You will see a button that says "Run workflow". Press the button, then enter the following:

• Use workflow from:
• The release branch to use:
• The version of the release:

(Yes there is redundancy between the above inputs that we plan to address.)

This triggers the release process, which builds the artifacts, publishes the artifacts, and creates and pushes a git tag with the version number.

After making the release:

• Merge a PR to main with the following changes
  • Bump version in these files to the next -SNAPSHOT version (e.g. from 1.9.0-SNAPSHOT to 1.10.0-SNAPSHOT)
  • version.gradle.kts
  • examples/distro/build.gradle
  • examples/extension/build.gradle
  • Bump the version in the download link in the root README.md file

Announcement

Once the GitHub workflow completes, go to Github release page, press Draft a new release to write release notes about the new release. If there is already a draft release notes, just point it at the created tag.

Patch Release

All patch releases should include only bug-fixes, and must avoid adding/modifying the public APIs.

In general, patch releases are only made for bug-fixes for the following types of issues:

• Regressions
• Memory leaks
• Deadlocks

Before making the release:

• Merge PR(s) containing the desired patches to the release branch
• Merge a PR to the release branch updating the CHANGELOG.md
• Merge a PR to the release branch updating the version in these files:
  • version.gradle.kts
  • examples/distro/build.gradle
  • examples/extension/build.gradle

To make a patch release, open the patch release build workflow in your browser here.

You will see a button that says "Run workflow". Press the button, then enter the following:

• Use workflow from:
• The release branch to use:
• The version of the release:

(Yes there is redundancy between the above inputs that we plan to address.)