The Rust Release Process

Here's how Rust is currently released:

Promote beta to stable (T-3 days, Monday)

Promote beta to stable. Temporarily turn off GitHub branch protection for the stable branch in rust-lang/rust repo. In your local Rust repo:

$ git fetch origin
$ git push origin origin/beta:stable -f
# make sure that the release notes file is as fresh as possible
$ git checkout origin/master -- RELEASES.md

Re-enable branch protection for the stable branch. Send a PR to rust-lang/rust on the stable branch making the following changes:

• Update src/ci/run.sh to pass channel=stable, not channel=beta.

Once the PR is sent, r+ it and give it a high p=1000.

The stable build will not deploy automatically to prod. The rust-central-station repository is configured to upload to dev every hour if it detects a change. You should be able to browse changes in dev.

As soon as this build is done post a message to irlo asking for testing. The index is https://dev-static-rust-lang-org.s3.amazonaws.com/dist/2015-09-17/index.html and our URL is then https://dev-static.rust-lang.org/dist/2015-09-17/index.html.

Test rustup with

RUSTUP_DIST_SERVER=https://dev-static.rust-lang.org rustup update stable

If something goes wrong, and we rebuild stable artifacts, you'll need to invalidate the dev-static bucket for RCS to re-release it.

1. Download https://dev-static.rust-lang.org/dist/channel-rust-1.35.0.toml The version number must be less than the current release, but otherwise doesn't matter.
2. Rename the file locally to channel-rust-stable.toml
3. Upload the file to the dev-static bucket into the dist folder, replacing channel-rust-stable.toml.
4. Go to CloudFront in AWS, to the dev-static bucket, and issue an invalidation for "/dist/channel-rust-stable.toml". This is necessary until https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-central-station/issues/49 is fixed.
5. (optional) login to central station, and run the following. This starts the dev-static promotion immediately, vs. waiting till the next hour.

docker exec -d -it rcs bash -c 'promote-release /tmp/stable stable /data/secrets-dev.toml 2>&1 | logger --tag release-stable'

Promote master to beta (T-2 days, Tuesday)

Create a new branch on rust-lang/cargo for the new beta. Here, rust-lang is the remote for https://github.com/rust-lang/rust.git. Replace YY with the minor version of master. First determine the branch point for cargo in rust-lang/rust, and then create a new branch:

$ cd rust
$ git fetch rust-lang
$ CARGO_SHA=`git rev-parse rust-lang/master:src/tools/cargo`
$ cd src/tools/cargo
$ git branch rust-1.YY.0 $CARGO_SHA
$ git push origin rust-1.YY.0

You'll need to temporarily disable branch protection on GitHub to push the new branch.

In theory one day we'll do the same for rust-lang/rls, but for now we haven't done this yet.

Temporarily disable banch protection on GitHub for the beta branch of the Rust repo. Promote rust-lang/rust's master branch to beta as with yesterday:

$ git fetch rust-lang
$ git push rust-lang rust-lang/master:beta -f

Re-enable branch protection on GitHub. Send a PR to the freshly created beta branch of rust-lang/rust which:

• Update src/stage0.txt
  • Change date to "YYYY-MM-DD" where the date is the archive date the stable build was uploaded
  • Change rustc to "X.Y.Z" where that's the version of rustc you just build
  • Change cargo to "A.B.C" where it's Cargo's version. That's typically "0.(Y+1).0" wrt the rustc version.
  • Comment rustfmt: nightly-YYYY-MM-DD
  • Uncomment dev: 1
• Update src/ci/run.sh to pass "--release-channel=beta".

Note that you probably don't want to update the RLS if it's working, but if it's not working beta won't land and it'll need to get updated. After this PR merges (through @bors) the beta should be automatically released.

Master bootstrap update (T-1 day, Wednesday)

Write a new blog post, update rust-www, and update rust-forge. Submit PRs for tomorrow.

Send a PR to the master branch to:

• modify src/stage0.txt to bootstrap from yesterday's beta
• modify src/bootstrap/channel.rs with the new version number

Release day (Thursday)

Decide on a time to do the release, T.

• T-30m - This is on rust-central-station:

  docker exec -d -it rcs bash -c 'promote-release /tmp/stable stable /data/secrets.toml 2>&1 | logger --tag release-stable-realz'
  

  That'll, in the background, schedule the promote-release binary to run on the production secrets (not the dev secrets). That'll sign everything, upload it, update the html index pages, and invalidate the CDN. Note that this takes about 30 minutes right now. Logs are in /opt/rcs/logs.

• T-10m - Locally, tag the new release and upload it. Use "x.y.z release" as the commit message.

  $ git tag -u FA1BE5FE 1.3.0 $COMMIT_SHA
  $ git push rust-lang 1.3.0
  

  After this Update thanks.rust-lang.org by triggering a build on Travis.

• T-5m - Merge blog post.

• T - Tweet and post everything!

  • Twitter @rustlang
  • Reddit /r/rust
  • Hacker News
  • Users forum

• T+5m - Tag Cargo the same way as rust-lang/rust and then run cargo publish for the tag you just created. You'll first need to comment out cargo-test-macro from Cargo.toml, then publish crates-io (in crates/crates-io) and finally publish cargo itself.

  To publish Cargo you may have to bump the version numbers for the crates-io and Cargo crates; there's no need to do that in a formal commit though, so your tag and the published code may differentiate in that way.

• T+1hr Send a PR to the beta branch to comment out dev: 1 again and update the date to download from (modifying src/stage0.txt).

Bask in your success.

Update dependencies (T+1 day, Friday)

In the repo:

$ cd src
$ cargo update

The very ambitious can use https://crates.io/crates/cargo-outdated and update through breaking changes.

Publishing a nightly based off a try build

Sometimes a PR requires testing how it behaves when downloaded from rustup, for example after a manifest change. In those cases it's possible to publish a new nightly based off that PR on dev-static.rust-lang.org.

Once the try build finishes make sure the merge commit for your PR is at the top of the try branch, log into the rust-central-station server and run this command:

docker exec -d -it rcs bash -c 'PROMOTE_RELEASE_OVERRIDE_BRANCH=try promote-release /tmp/nightly-tmp nightly /data/secrets-dev.toml 2>&1 | logger --tag release-nightly-tmp'

If the try branch doesn't contain the merge commit (because a new build started in the meantime) you can create a new branch pointing to the merge commit and run (replacing BRANCH_NAME with the name of the branch):

docker exec -d -it rcs bash -c 'PROMOTE_RELEASE_OVERRIDE_BRANCH=BRANCH_NAME promote-release /tmp/nightly-tmp nightly /data/secrets-dev.toml 2>&1 | logger --tag release-nightly-tmp'

You can follow the build progress with:

sudo tail -n 1000 -f /var/log/syslog | grep release-nightly-tmp

Once the build ends it's possible to install the new nightly with:

RUSTUP_DIST_SERVER=https://dev-static.rust-lang.org rustup toolchain install nightly