piskel/RELEASE.md

Release instructions

• retrieve source code and dependencies

  • clone piskel git clone https://github.com/piskelapp/piskel
  • clone piskel website git clone https://github.com/piskelapp/piskel-website
  • download the appengine SDK for python at this url. It seems recent versions don't work for me on Windows. GoogleAppEngine-1.9.67.msi looks ok...

• prepare the release

  • in piskel-website clone, checkout the master branch, not the release. The release branch is similar to the master branch, except it doesn't ignore the statics files coming from the piskel project. The idea is that we can easily checkout the release branch to do a new release, without having to rebuild piskel, in case nothing changed in piskel itself. We will switch to the release branch when we perform the final release.
  • in piskel clone, create a new branch for the release git checkout -b vX.Y
  • build and copy piskel to piskel-website (assumes the clones are in the same folder) grunt && node bin/copy-to-piskel-website.js

• local test

  • start piskel-website in the Google app engine launcher, test manually the update
  • if any issue is detected create a commit to fix it (on the vX.Y branch) and push it.

• beta test

  • check the version in app.yaml is set to 'beta'. For historical reasons, alpha is the "production" version, while beta is the ... beta version. Don't ask.
  • in the google app engine launcher, deploy this version.
  • go to https://beta-dot-piskel-app.appspot.com and test (while this is not production frontend, it shares the same database, so be careful with what you create and delete)
  • if any issue is detected create a commit to fix it (on master) and push it.

• check caches...

  • If any icon was modified or any script of piskel-website was modified, there's no nice way to clean the cache on each release... so we just put a time stamp in the requests. eg background-image: url(../img/icons@2x.png?20181125); or <script type="text/javascript" src="/static/js/piskel-animated-preview.js?20181124"></script>. Erk.

• finalize the release

  • in piskel update version in package.json. Remove the "-SNAPSHOT" at the end and commit the change, with a commit message such as release: bump version to vX.Y.
  • in piskel-website checkout the release branch. Rebase it on master (that's pretty bad, we should probably cherry pick all the changes between the two branches...)
  • once again build and copy piskel to piskel-website
  • in piskel-website run git status to check that there are a bunch of changes to commit. (test locally again if you are paranoid)
  • in piskel-website commit the current changes with a commit message such as update statics for release vX.Y
  • Check that the version in app.yaml is now set to alpha. Deploy. Pray.

• post release

  • in piskel-website push the release branch to github
  • in piskel add a last commit to update the version in package.json to update the version to vX+1.0-SNAPSHOT
  • create a tag on github