daml/release/RELEASE.md

Making a Release

First, you need to decide whether you are making a technical snapshot ("prerelease" at the github level, hereafter "snapshot") or an officially supported release (hereafter "stable release"). For the latter, there are extra steps marked as [STABLE] in the following instructions. You have to skip those if you are making a snapshot release, that is, one intended mostly for internal use and early testing, but which makes no promises about future compatibility.

In either case, before going through the following list, you need to know which commit you want to create the release from, $SHA. For a stable release, it is highly recommended that this be the same commit as the latest existing snapshot, so we "bless" an existing, tested version of the SDK rather than try our luck with a random new one. For a snapshot, this should generally be the latest commit on master.

1. [STABLE] Coordinate with the product and marketing teams to define release highlights, tweets, blog posts, as well as timeline for publishing the release. Define a version number, $VERSION. The following command may be useful as a starting point; it will list all changes between the previous stable release and the latest snapshot release:

   ./release.sh changes stable latest
   

2. Pull the latest master branch of the daml repository and create a new, clean branch off it.

   • For a snapshot, run ./release.sh snapshot HEAD.
     • If applicable (e.g. latest release was a stable one), edit LATEST to update the release "version". For example, change:

       6ea118d6142d2a937286b0a7bf9846dbcdb1751b 0.13.56-snapshot.20200318.3529.0.6ea118d6
       

       to:

       6ea118d6142d2a937286b0a7bf9846dbcdb1751b 0.13.57-snapshot.20200318.3529.0.6ea118d6
       

   • For a stable release, run echo "$SHA $VERSION" > LATEST.
     • Ideally, for a stable release, the resulting change is only to cut off the prerelease part of the version number (the -snapshot...).

3. [STABLE] In docs/source/support/release-notes.rst, add a new header and label for the new version. (See previous releases as examples.)

   Retrieve the new release notes using the command:

   ./unreleased.sh $LAST_VERSION..$SHA
   

   where $LAST_VERSION is the previous stable version. (See man gitrevisions for the full syntax of revision ranges.)

   This command outputs each change individually with its appropriate section. You need to group them into sections in the release-notes.rst file. (Again, see previous releases for examples.)

   The changelog may also specify edits to existing changelog additions. These are reported with the WARNING tag, for example:

   CHANGELOG_BEGIN
   
   WARNING: fix typo in entry "Adds new amdin API to upload DAR files" with the following.
   
   - [Sandbox] Adds new admin API to upload DAR files
   
   CHANGELOG_END
   

   You will need to manually incorporate such edits to the changelog.

4. Once this is done, create a GitHub pull request (PR) with the above changes to the LATEST and (for a stable release) release-notes.rst files. It is important that your PR changes no other file.

5. Get a review and approval on your PR and then merge it into master. [STABLE] For a stable release, the approval MUST be from the team lead of the Language, Runtime or Product team.

6. Once the CI checks have passed for the corresponding master build, the release should be available on Bintray, Maven Central and GitHub, and have a Git tag. The release should be visible on GitHub with prerelease status, meaning it's not yet ready for users to consume. The release notes should not be defined yet and will be adjusted later on. Maven central has a delay of around 20 minutes until the new version is visible. (Note: The 20-minute delay is for artifacts to be available through e.g. mvn build; the delay for artifacts to show up in web searches on the Maven Central website is up to two hours. Do not worry if the artifacts do not show on the website yet.)

7. Run through the following test plan on one of Linux or macOS:

   1. Install the new SDK using:

      curl -sSL https://get.daml.com/ | sh -s $(cat LATEST | gawk '{print $2}')
      

      Note: this assumes you have the up-to-date LATEST file, either because you just checked out master or because you're still on the release PR commit.

   2. Run daml version --assistant=yes and verify that the new version is selected as the assistant version and the default version for new projects.

   3. Create a new project with daml new quickstart quickstart-java and switch to it using cd quickstart.

   4. Verify the new version is specified in daml.yaml as the sdk-version.

   5. Run daml start. Your browser should be opened automatically at http://localhost:7500. Login as Alice and verify that there is 1 contract and 3 templates. Close the tab and kill daml start using Ctrl-C.

   6. Run daml build.

   7. In 3 separate terminals (since each command except for daml script … will block), run:

      1. daml sandbox --wall-clock-time --port 6865 .daml/dist/quickstart-0.0.1.dar
      2. daml script --dar .daml/dist/quickstart-0.0.1.dar --script-name Setup:initialize --ledger-host localhost --ledger-port 6865 --wall-clock-time
      3. daml navigator server localhost 6865 --port 7500
      4. mvn compile exec:java@run-quickstart

      Note: It takes some time for our artifacts to be available on Maven Central. If you try running the last command before the artifacts are available, you will get a "not found" error. Trying to build again in the next 24 hours will result in:

      Failure to find ... was cached in the local repository, resolution will not be reattempted until the update interval of digitalasset-releases has elapsed or updates are forced
      

      This is Maven telling you it has locally cached that "not found" result and will consider it valid for 24h. To bypass that and force Maven to try the network call again, add a -U option, as in mvn compile exec:java@run-quickstart -U. Note that this is required to bypass your local cache of the failure; it will not be required for a user trying to run the quickstart after the artifacts have been published.

   8. Point your browser to http://localhost:7500, login as Alice and verify that there is 1 contract, 3 templates and 1 owned IOU.

   9. Check that curl http://localhost:8080/iou returns:

      {"0":{"issuer":"EUR_Bank","owner":"Alice","currency":"EUR","amount":100.0000000000,"observers":[]}}
      

   10. Kill all processes.

   11. Run daml studio --replace=always. This should open VSCode and trigger the DAML extension that's bundled with the new SDK version. (The new VSCode extension will not be in the marketplace at this point.)

   12. Open daml/Main.daml.

   13. Click on Scenario results above setup and wait for the scenario results to appear.

   14. Add + at the end of line 12, after "Alice" and confirm you get an error in line 13.

   15. Add 1 after the + and confirm you get an error in line 12.

   16. Delete the +1 and the e in Alice and verify that the scenario results are updated to the misspelled name.

   17. Right click on eurBank in line 18 and verify that "Go to Definition" takes you to the definition in line 15.

   18. Close all files.

8. On your PR, add the comment:

   Manual tests passed on [Linux/macOS].

   specifying which platform you tested on.

9. Run through the following test plan on Windows. This is slightly shortened to make testing faster and since most issues are not platform specific.

   1. Close any running SDK instance in PowerShell (Navigator or Sandbox).
   2. Download and run the Windows installer (the .exe file) from https://github.com/digital-asset/daml/releases.
   3. If asked if you want to remove an existing installation, click Yes.
   4. Open a new PowerShell.
   5. Run daml new quickstart to create a new project and switch to it using cd quickstart.
   6. Run daml start.
   7. Open your browser at http://localhost:7500, verify that you can login as Alice and there is one template and one contract.
   8. Kill daml start with Ctrl-C.
   9. Run daml studio --replace=always and open daml/Main.daml. Verify that the scenario result appears within 30 seconds.
   10. Add + at the end of line 26 after "Alice" and verify that you get an error.

10. On your PR, add the comment:

    Manual tests passed on Windows.

11. If the release is bad, delete the release from the releases page. Mention why it is bad as a comment on your PR, and stop the process here.

12. Add the label Standard-Change to your PR.

13. Go to the releases page and edit the release to look better. For both types of release, the release title should be the version number (i.e. same as the git tag). For a snapshot, the message should be set to

    This is a snapshot release. Use at your own risk.

    For a stable release, the message should contain the team-lead-approved release notes, and the "prerelease" checkbox should be unticked.

14. Announce the release on the relevant internal Slack channels (#product-daml, #team-daml). Add release notes in a thread under your announcement. For a stable release, these are the notes decided with the product team; for a snapshot release, include both the changes in this release (i.e. since the last snapshot) and the complete list of changes since the last stable release. Use the raw output of unreleased.sh.

    You can produce the changes since the previous (snapshot or stable) release by running:

    ./release.sh changes previous latest
    

    and the changes between the latest stable and the previous release with:

    ./release.sh changes stable previous
    

15. [STABLE] Coordinate with product (& marketing) for the relevant public announcements (public Slack, Twitter, etc.).

16. [STABLE] Documentation is published automatically once the release is public on Github, however it runs on an hourly job and takes about 20 minutes to complete, so it could take up to an hour and a half depending on when the prerelease tag was removed.

Thanks for making a release!