Ruby gem and Chef cookbook for a highly-opinionated GitHub release workflow.
We are following Semantic Versioning with the short git commit hash integrated in the build metadata.
If a version contains multiple releases, they shall be ordered by their short git commit hashes according to the master branch.
For every push to the master branch (usually after a pull request), a build will be executed. On every successful build of the master branch, a tag/release shall be created named version+commit. This release will be marked as prerelease in GitHub.
Once the developer is happy with a release, the prerelease tag may be lifted. It is highly advised to make sure all releases have different versions, and not rely on different commit hashes.
master branch (ordered from latest, descending):
| message | hash |
|---|---|
| Merge pull request #3 | 423hgj7 |
| commit | vnsdh89 |
| commit | asdflkj |
| Merge pull request #4 | 345ja87 |
| commit | asdf345 |
| commit | jlkj987 |
We will take the example of building on every merge to master. For a given version number 1.3.2, there will be two tags/releases, both tagged as prerelease:
1.3.2+423hgj71.3.2+345ja87
In this case 1.3.2+423hgj7 will take precedence over 1.3.2+345ja87 since it is later in the master branch.
Latest prerelase should always be deployed to staging.
Latest release should always be deployed to production.
The Ruby gem is used to push releases to GitHub, and the Chef cookbook is used to get the release URL from GitHub (the remote_file resource should be then used for downloading).
The Ruby gem may also be used to purge old releases.