Releasing

Setup environment from scratch

  1. Install Go.

    1. Ensure that your GOBIN directory (by default $(go env GOPATH)/bin) is in your PATH.
    2. Check it’s working by running go version.
      • If it doesn’t work, check the install location, usually /usr/local/go, is on your PATH.

  2. Sign one of the contributor license agreements below.

  3. Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-go

  4. Change into the checked out source: cd google-cloud-go

  5. Fork the repo and add your fork as a secondary remote (this is necessary in order to create PRs).

Determine which module to release

The Go client libraries have several modules. Each module does not strictly correspond to a single library - they correspond to trees of directories. If a file needs to be released, you must release the closest ancestor module.

To see all modules:

$ cat `find . -name go.mod` | grep module
module cloud.google.com/go
module cloud.google.com/go/bigtable
module cloud.google.com/go/firestore
module cloud.google.com/go/bigquery
module cloud.google.com/go/storage
module cloud.google.com/go/datastore
module cloud.google.com/go/pubsub
module cloud.google.com/go/spanner
module cloud.google.com/go/logging

The cloud.google.com/go is the repository root module. Each other module is a submodule.

So, if you need to release a change in bigtable/bttest/inmem.go, the closest ancestor module is cloud.google.com/go/bigtable - so you should release a new version of the cloud.google.com/go/bigtable submodule.

If you need to release a change in asset/apiv1/asset_client.go, the closest ancestor module is cloud.google.com/go - so you should release a new version of the cloud.google.com/go repository root module. Note: releasing cloud.google.com/go has no impact on any of the submodules, and vice-versa. They are released entirely independently.

Test failures

If there are any test failures in the Kokoro build, releases are blocked until the failures have been resolved.

How to release cloud.google.com/go

Check for failures in the continuous Kokoro build. If there are any failures in the most recent build, address them before proceeding with the release.

Automated Release

If there are changes that have not yet been released a pull request should be automatically opened by release-please with a title like “chore: release 0.XX.0”, where XX is the next version to be released. To cut a release, approve and merge this pull request. Doing so will update the CHANGES.md, tag the merged commit with the appropriate version, and draft a GitHub release.

Manual Release

If for whatever reason the automated release process is not working as expected, here is how to manually cut a release.

  1. Navigate to google-cloud-go/ and switch to master.
  2. git pull
  3. Run git tag -l | grep -v beta | grep -v alpha to see all existing releases. The current latest tag $CV is the largest tag. It should look something like vX.Y.Z (note: ignore all LIB/vX.Y.Z tags - these are tags for a specific library, not the module root). We’ll call the current version $CV and the new version $NV.
  4. On master, run git log $CV... to list all the changes since the last release. NOTE: You must manually visually parse out changes to submodules [1] (the git log is going to show you things in submodules, which are not going to be part of your release).
  5. Edit CHANGES.md to include a summary of the changes.
  6. In internal/version/version.go, update const Repo to today’s date with the format YYYYMMDD.
  7. In internal/version run go generate.
  8. Commit the changes, ignoring the generated .go-r file. Push to your fork, and create a PR titled chore: release $NV.
  9. Wait for the PR to be reviewed and merged. Once it’s merged, and without merging any other PRs in the meantime: a. Switch to master. b. git pull c. Tag the repo with the next version: git tag $NV. d. Push the tag to origin: git push origin $NV
  10. Update the releases page with the new release, copying the contents of CHANGES.md.

How to release a submodule

We have several submodules, including cloud.google.com/go/logging, cloud.google.com/go/datastore, and so on.

To release a submodule:

(these instructions assume we’re releasing cloud.google.com/go/datastore - adjust accordingly)

  1. Check for failures in the continuous Kokoro build. If there are any failures in the most recent build, address them before proceeding with the release. (This applies even if the failures are in a different submodule from the one being released.)
  2. Navigate to google-cloud-go/ and switch to master.
  3. git pull
  4. Run git tag -l | grep datastore | grep -v beta | grep -v alpha to see all existing releases. The current latest tag $CV is the largest tag. It should look something like datastore/vX.Y.Z. We’ll call the current version $CV and the new version $NV.
  5. On master, run git log $CV.. -- datastore/ to list all the changes to the submodule directory since the last release.
  6. Edit datastore/CHANGES.md to include a summary of the changes.
  7. In internal/version run go generate.
  8. Commit the changes, ignoring the generated .go-r file. Push to your fork, and create a PR titled chore(datastore): release $NV.
  9. Wait for the PR to be reviewed and merged. Once it’s merged, and without merging any other PRs in the meantime: a. Switch to master. b. git pull c. Tag the repo with the next version: git tag $NV. d. Push the tag to origin: git push origin $NV
  10. Update the releases page with the new release, copying the contents of datastore/CHANGES.md.

Appendix

1: This should get better as submodule tooling matures.