## A maintainer's guide to releasing Docker
So you're in charge of a Docker release? Cool. Here's what to do.
If your experience deviates from this document, please document the changes
to keep it up-to-date.
### 1. Pull from master and create a release branch
```bash
git checkout master
git pull
git checkout -b bump_$VERSION
```
### 2. Update CHANGELOG.md
You can run this command for reference:
```bash
LAST_VERSION=$(git tag | grep -E "v[0-9\.]+$" | sort -nr | head -n 1)
git log $LAST_VERSION..HEAD
```
Each change should be formatted as ```BULLET CATEGORY: DESCRIPTION```
* BULLET is either ```-```, ```+``` or ```*```, to indicate a bugfix,
new feature or upgrade, respectively.
* CATEGORY should describe which part of the project is affected.
Valid categories are:
* Builder
* Documentation
* Hack
* Packaging
* Remote API
* Runtime
* DESCRIPTION: a concise description of the change that is relevant to the
end-user, using the present tense. Changes should be described in terms
of how they affect the user, for example "new feature X which allows Y",
"fixed bug which caused X", "increased performance of Y".
EXAMPLES:
```
+ Builder: 'docker build -t FOO' applies the tag FOO to the newly built
container.
* Runtime: improve detection of kernel version
- Remote API: fix a bug in the optional unix socket transport
```
### 3. Change the contents of the VERSION file
### 4. Run all tests
FIXME
### 5. Commit and create a pull request to the "release" branch
```bash
git add CHANGELOG.md
git commit -m "Bump version to $VERSION"
git push origin bump_$VERSION
```
### 6. Get 2 other maintainers to validate the pull request
### 7. Merge the pull request and apply tags
```bash
git checkout release
git merge bump_$VERSION
git tag -a v$VERSION # Don't forget the v!
git tag -f -a latest
git push
git push --tags
```
### 8. Publish binaries
To run this you will need access to the release credentials.
Get them from [the infrastructure maintainers](
https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/blob/master/hack/infrastructure/MAINTAINERS).
```bash
docker build -t docker .
docker run \
-e AWS_S3_BUCKET=get-nightly.docker.io \
-e AWS_ACCESS_KEY=$(cat ~/.aws/access_key) \
-e AWS_SECRET_KEY=$(cat ~/.aws/secret_key) \
-e GPG_PASSPHRASE=supersecretsesame \
docker
hack/release.sh
```
It will build and upload the binaries on the specified bucket (you should
use get-nightly.docker.io for general testing, and once everything is fine,
switch to get.docker.io).
### 9. Rejoice!
Congratulations! You're done.