CAS Release Process

This page documents the steps that a release engineer should take for cutting a CAS server release.

Sonatype Setup

You will need to sign up for a Sonatype account and must ask to be authorized to publish releases to the org.apereo package by creating a JIRA. Once you have, you may be asked to have one of the current project members vouch for you.

GPG Setup

You will need to generate your own PGP signatures to sign the release artifacts prior to uploading them to a central repository. In order to create OpenPGP signatures, you will need to generate a key pair. You need to provide the build with your key information, which means three things:

• The public key ID (The last 8 symbols of the keyId. You can use gpg -K to get it).
• The absolute path to the secret key ring file containing your private key. Since gpg 2.1, you need to export the keys with command:

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gpg --keyring secring.gpg --export-secret-keys > ~/.gnupg/secring.gpg

• The passphrase used to protect your private key.

The above settings will need to be placed into the ~/.gradle/gradle.properties file:

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signing.keyId=7A24P9QB
signing.password=P@$$w0rd
signing.secretKeyRingFile=/Users/example/.gnupg/secring.gpg

Additional notes on how artifacts are signed using the Gradle signing plugin are available here

Environment Setup

• Load your SSH key and ensure this SSH key is also referenced in GitHub.
• Adjust $GRADLE_OPTS to initialize the JVM heap size, if necessary.
• Load your ~/.gradle/gradle.properties file with the following as an example:

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org.gradle.daemon=false
org.gradle.parallel=false

• Checkout the CAS project: git clone git@github.com:apereo/cas.git cas-server
• Make sure you have the latest version of JDK 11 installed via java -version.

Preparing the Release

Apply the following steps to prepare the release environment. There are a few variations to take into account depending on whether a new release branch should be created.

Create Branch

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# Replace $BRANCH with CAS version (i.e. 6.5.x)
git checkout -b $BRANCH

GitHub Actions

Change GitHub Actions workflows to trigger and only build the newly-created release branch:

• Modify the analysis.yml workflow to run on the newly-created branch.
  • Disable checkLicense tasks.
• Modify the validation.yml workflow to run on the newly-created branch.
• Modify the publish.yml workflow to run on the newly-created branch.
• Modify the publish-docs.yml to point to the newly-created branch.
• Modify the puppeteer.yml to point to the newly-created branch.
• Disable the following workflows: build.yml, dependencies.yml, publish-[aws|azure|gpr].yml, test-[macos|windows].yml. These can be disabled in the YAML configuration via:

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on:
  push:
    branches-ignore:
      - '**'

Do not forget to commit all changes and push changes upstream, creating a new remote branch to track the release.

Performing the Release

• In the project’s gradle.properties, change the project version to the release version and remove the -SNAPSHOT. (i.e. 6.0.0-RC1).
• Build and release the project using the following command:

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./release.sh

Finalizing the Release

• Create a tag for the released version, commit the change and push the tag to the upstream repository. (i.e. v5.0.0-RC1).

You should also switch back to the main development branch (i.e. master) and follow these steps:

• In the project’s gradle.properties, change the project version to the next development version (i.e. 5.0.0-SNAPSHOT).
• Push your changes to the upstream repository.

Housekeeping

Remember to mark the release tag as pre-release, when releasing RC versions of the project on GitHub.

Update CAS Initializr

Make sure to update the CAS Initializr to allow for generation of projects based on the newly-released version.

Update Documentation

• Configure docs to point current to the latest available version here.
• Modify the cas-server-documentation/_config.yml file to exclude relevant branches and directories from the build.
• Configure docs to include the new release in the list of available versions.
• Update the project’s README.md page to list the new version, if necessary.
• Update the build process to include any needed information on how to build the new release.
• Update the release notes overview and remove all previous entries.
• Send a pull request to Algolia for the new documentation version to index the new space for search requests.

Update Maintenance Policy

Update the Maintenance Policy to note the release schedule and EOL timeline.

Update Demos

(Optional) A number of CAS demos today run on Heroku and are tracked in dedicated branches inside the codebase. Take a pass and update each, when relevant.