Releases

Since we release our site changes as soon as they’re approved, we treat release notes more like Weekly Ships—they’re an announcement of what we’ve done recently.

Because we work in Github, we can take advantage of Github’s automated Release Notes features by tracking releases there.

We publish new release notes once a month. We use semantic versioning for our release versions, which is formatted as v[MAJOR].[MINOR].[PATCH] (example: v2.5.8).

• MAJOR - uptick this number for redesigns or replatforming (rarest)
• MINOR - uptick this number for other changes, or releases containing both changes and bugfixes (most common)
• PATCH - uptick this number for bug fixes only

How to make a new release

You must have admin rights to this repo in order to create new tags and publish new releases.

1. Take a look at the release notes view on our project board.
2. To create an 18F Methods release go to the 18F Methods releases page. To create an 18F UX Guide releases page.
3. Click "Create a new release"
4. Determine whether this sprint's work is a Major, Minor, or Patch release
5. Under "Choose a tag", enter the new version number or date and select "Create new tag on publish" (examples: v2.5.9 or 2023.01-minor).
6. Set Target as the main branch
7. Set the Release title as the new tag number (example: v2.5.9)
8. For release notes, click "Generate Release Notes"
9. Refine and reorganize notes on the issue in the release notes view under Added, Updated, and Fixed headings
10. Check box "Set as the latest release"
11. Publish release