RELEASING.md

Releasing

The following steps outline the release process for both new minor versions and patch versions.

The command examples below assume that the canonical "mongodb" repository has the remote name "mongodb". You may need to adjust these commands if you've given the remote another name (e.g. "upstream"). The "origin" remote name was not used as it likely refers to your personal fork.

It helps to keep your own fork in sync with the "mongodb" repository (i.e. any branches and tags on the main repository should also exist in your fork). This is left as an exercise to the reader.

Ensure PHP version compatibility

Ensure that the test suite completes on supported versions of PHP.

Transition JIRA issues and version

All issues associated with the release version should be in the "Closed" state and have a resolution of "Fixed". Issues with other resolutions (e.g. "Duplicate", "Works as Designed") should be removed from the release version so that they do not appear in the release notes.

Check the corresponding "laravel-*.x" fix version to see if it contains any issues that are resolved as "Fixed" and should be included in this release version.

Update the version's release date and status from the Manage Versions page.

Update version info

This uses semantic versioning. Do not break backwards compatibility in a non-major release or your users will kill you.

Before proceeding, ensure that the default branch is up-to-date with all code changes in this maintenance branch. This is important because we will later merge the ensuing release commits with --strategy=ours, which will ignore changes from the merged commits.

Tag the release

Create a tag for the release and push:

$ git tag -a -m "Release X.Y.Z" X.Y.Z
$ git push mongodb --tags

Branch management

Creating a maintenance branch and updating default branch name

When releasing a new major or minor version (e.g. 4.0.0), the default branch should be renamed to the next version (e.g. 4.1). Renaming the default branch using GitHub's UI ensures that all open pull request are changed to target the new version.

Once the default branch has been renamed, create the maintenance branch for the version to be released (e.g. 4.0):

$ git checkout -b X.Y
$ git push mongodb X.Y

After releasing a patch version

If this was a patch release, the maintenance branch must be merged up to the default branch (e.g. 4.1):

$ git checkout 4.1
$ git pull mongodb 4.1
$ git merge 4.0 --strategy=ours
$ git push mongodb

The --strategy=ours option ensures that all changes from the merged commits will be ignored. This is OK because we previously ensured that the 4.1 branch was up-to-date with all code changes in this maintenance branch before tagging.

Publish release notes

The following template should be used for creating GitHub release notes via this form.

The PHP team is happy to announce that version X.Y.Z of the MongoDB integration for Laravel is now available.

**Release Highlights**

<one or more paragraphs describing important changes in this release>

A complete list of resolved issues in this release may be found in [JIRA]($JIRA_URL).

**Documentation**

Documentation for this library may be found in the [Readme](https://github.com/mongodb/laravel-mongodb/blob/$VERSION/README.md).

**Installation**

This library may be installed or upgraded with:

    composer require mongodb/laravel-mongodb:X.Y.Z

Installation instructions for the `mongodb` extension may be found in the [PHP.net documentation](https://php.net/manual/en/mongodb.installation.php).

The URL for the list of resolved JIRA issues will need to be updated with each release. You may obtain the list from this form.

If commits from community contributors were included in this release, append the following section:

**Thanks**

Thanks for our community contributors for this release:

 * [$CONTRIBUTOR_NAME](https://github.com/$GITHUB_USERNAME)

Release announcements should also be posted in the MongoDB Product & Driver Announcements: Driver Releases forum and shared on Twitter.