Brane Dump: Your Release Process Sucks

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2024-11-24 12:30:03

Software that gets deployed directly onto servers (websites, mostly, but also the infrastructure that runs Pwnedkeys, for example) is deployed with nothing more than git push prod main. I’ll talk more about that some other day.

Today is about the release process for everything else I maintain – Rust / Ruby libraries, standalone programs, and so forth. To release those, I use the following, extremely intricate process:

Create an annotated git tag, where the name of the tag is the software version I’m releasing, and the annotation is the release notes for that version.

Yes, it absolutely is that simple. And if your release process is any more complicated than that, then you are suffering unnecessarily.

The annotated tag is one git’s best-kept secrets. They’ve been available in git for practically forever (I’ve been using them since at least 2014, which is “practically forever” in software development), yet almost everyone I mention them to has never heard of them.

A “tag”, in git parlance, is a repository-unique named label that points to a single commit (as identified by the commit’s SHA1 hash). Annotating a tag is simply associating a block of free-form text with that tag.