Releasing

If you are a Planetary employee who wants to know how to release Planetary's iOS app you have come to the right place.

First Time Setup

• Check out planetary-ios and follow the Developer Installation instructions in the README.md.
• Check out planetary-social/planetary-config-ios repository.
• brew install mono0926/license-plist/license-plist to install the tool that generates our acknowledgements.
• Get added to the Verse Communications Apple Developer team with Manager permissions or higher.
• Ask an existing team members for the build secrets file and copy it to Resources/Secrets.release.plist.
• Tell git to never commit changes to the secrets

git update-index --skip-worktree Resources/Secrets.release.plist

• Get credentials for Twitter.
• Get credentials for Zendesk.
• Get credentials for the Planetary SSB account at https://planetary.rocks
• Join our Discord or Matrix server (they are bridged together).

Build & Upload

• Checkout the latest commit of the main branch.
• Create a release branch including the version number like release/1.0.16.
• Update the preloaded feed using the instructions at https://github.com/planetary-social/feed_seralizer/blob/main/README.md
• Increment the version number if necessary, following Semantic Versioning guidelines. You can do this by running fastlane bump_{major, minor, or patch}. Fastlane will automatically bump the build number later on.
• Update CHANGELOG.md in the Github repository.
• Run fastlane beta to build and upload the app to TestFlight.
• Commit changes

Deploy to TestFlight

• Wait for the build to finish processing in the TestFlight dashboard.
• Click on the build in the TestFlight Dashboard and fill out the Test Details box.
• Distribute the TestFlight build to the appropriate groups and conduct UAT if necessary.

Submit for review

• Translate the CHANGELOG into release notes by removing GitHub issue numbers and overly technical language.
• Ask Sebastian to translate release notes into Spanish.
• Ask Filip to translate release notes into Polish.
• Open App Store Connect and click "Create a Release" in the top left.
• Put the release notes in the What's New In This Version section for each language. You can change the language at the top.
• Select "Manually release this version" in the Version Release Section unless you have already completed testing and want the build to go out automatically.
• Click "Submit for Review".
• Perform final QA testing.

After QA & App Store Review Approval

• Do a final check of TestFlight feedback and Github issues for any blocking bugs.
• Create a new page in the Release Notes section in Zendesk.
• Tag the deployed commit with the semantic version number i.e. "1.0.7".
• Create a Github Release, copying in the tag name and a link to the CHANGELOG.
• Click "Release this Version" in App Store Connect
• Merge the release branch into main
• Post release notes to Planetary account at https://planetary.rocks. (Connect to replicate with sbot gossip.connect "net:planetary.rocks:8008~shs:l1sGqWeCZRA99gN+t9sI6+UOzGcHq3KhLQUYEwb4DCo=")
• Post release notes on Twitter
• Post release notes on Discord
• Update this wiki page with any procedural changes.