How to create a Landlab release

New releases are built and uploaded to Anaconda.org whenever a new tag that starts with the letter v is created and pushed to GitHub. As an example, the following will cause a new release to be built:

$ git tag v0.1.1 # Create the tag locally
$ git push --tags # Push the tag to the remote

A new release is created (v0.1.1) and the tag pushed to GitHub. Travis-CI notices the tagged commit, and after building and testing the package, creates a fresh new package that is uploaded to Anaconda.org.

Note

Although you can create such a tag on any branch, releases should only come from the release branch. Make sure that when you create a tag you are doing so on release (and all your changes are committed).

A couple notes about creating a new version:

1. Landlab follows Semantic Versioning rules for version assignment and formatting. Please stick to them.

2. The version given in the tag name must match that in landlab/__init__.py. The version must also be changed in .conda-recipe/meta.yaml. However, meta.yaml doesn’t like dashes so if your version contains a dash just leave it out in this file (for example 1.0.0-beta.6 becomes 1.0.0beta.6).

3. If you mess up (forget to update all the version strings scattered throughout the code, for example), you can always delete the tag and recreate it. To do this, you’ll need to delete both the remote tag and the local tag.

   $ git push --delete origin <tagname> # Delete the tag on the remote repository
   $ git tag --delete <tagname> # Delete the tag from the local repository
   

   where <tagname> is the name of your tag (v0.1.1, for example).

4. If your new tag was successfully pushed to GitHub, you will be able to see it with the rest of the releases and tags.

5. To see if your new release was created successfully, you can do one or all of the following:

   • Check the logs for the build of your tagged commit on Travis-CI.
   • Check Anaconda.org to see if your release appears there.
   • Check if conda can see your new release with

   conda search landlab -c landlab. See the

   conda docs for a description of conda and how to use it, or you can always use conda -h from the command line.

The Release Checklist

1. Make sure you are on the release branch.

   $ git checkout release
   

2. Make sure all the version strings match and use Semantic Versioning.

   • landlab/__init__.py
   • .conda-recipe/meta.yaml

3. Commit your changes.

4. Create a tag for this release that matches the string in __init__.py but that starts with the letter v.

   $ git tag v0.1.1
   

5. Push your tag to the remote.

   $ git push --tags
   

Helpful links

1. Using conda: What conda is and how to use it.
2. git tags: What git tags are and how to create them.
3. The git tag command: A description of all of the options for the git tag command (including git tag –delete).
4. landlab on Travis: The latest Travis builds of landlab.
5. landlab on Anaconda: The conda packages for landlab releases.
6. Semantic Versioning: Rules for assigning and formatting versions.