Creating a release and deploying it

Pre-release

Before a release you should run all the system tests on your local machine.

Creating a release

1. Make sure dodal has an up-to-date release by following the processes here.
2. Create a new branch from main named pre followed by the release version e.g. pre_v4.2.0. The release versions should look like v{major}.{minor}.{patch}. See here if you're unsure on what the release version should be.
3. On this branch pin the version of dodal to that made in step 1 and the latest release of nexgen
4. Go here.
5. Select Choose a new tag and type the version of the release.
6. Select the branch created in step 2 as the target
7. Click on Generate release notes. This will create a starting set of release notes based on PR titles since the last release.
8. You should now manually go through each line on the release notes and read it from the perspective of a beamline scientist. It should be clear from each what the change means to the beamline and should have links to easily find further info.
9. Publish the release

Deciding release numbers

Releases should obviously be versioned higher than the previous latest release. Otherwise you should follow this guide:

• Major - Changes that will break compatibility between GDA and Artemis, large code rewrites
• Minor - New features
• Patch - Bug fixes

Deploying a release

Remember to discuss any new deployments with the appropriate beamline scientist. The /deploy/deploy_artemis.sh script will deploy the latest Artemis version to a specified beamline. To do a new deployment you should run the deploy script from your Artemis dev environment with e.g.

python ./deploy/deploy_artemis.py i03

If you want to test the script you can run:

python ./deploy/deploy_artemis.py dev

and a released version will be put in /tmp/artemis_release_test