FileSender Documentation

FileSender is an open source web based application that allows authenticated users to securely and easily send arbitrarily large files to other users.
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Release Process

Here you can find how to make a new release for filesender. Details of past and planned filesender releases are listed in the release schedule.

Releases are numbered incrementally with a structure of MAJOR.PATCH naming, where MAJOR and PATCH are both numbers. Releases are made when there is functionality added, removed, changed, or fixed. Releases are cut from the GitHub master branch. Updates from the development branch are squashed into a single commit and pushed up to github as a pull request to master.

Source packages

  • First make sure that you really want to make a release. Make sure that you have merged your last pull requests and do not have anything remaining in your local development branch that you would like in the release.

  • Releases are cut from the GitHub master branch. The master will have squashed commits from the development branch. The updates from development need to be merged into master using a pull request.

  • A tag will be made during the release process. There is no need to make one locally.

  • Visit the GitHub release page and click on Draft a new release. Make sure you select master as the branch to make the release from.

  • In the tag version selection enter something following the format filesender-MAJORVER-betaVER. For example filesender-3.0. Releases are tagged using git tags in the form of -filesender-MAJOR.PATCH

  • It can be useful to find a previous release and click “edit” and copy the markdown to the new release you have started and remove the content from each section. Otherwise, GitHub releases have a set structure, providing sections about: 1) The release version, 2) Distribution 3) Installation 4) Upgrade notes 5) Major changes 6) Configuration changes 7) Support and Feedback.

  • The release title and description should follow the style of the last release on the release page. It is best to “edit” the page for the previous release and copy that markdown to the new release page as a template.

  • If there are changes to the database give some indication of what has changed and that the database update script must be run

  • If there are changes in the templates directory give an indication and some information about that.

  • The configuration directives differences can be found by doing a git diff to the previous release.

  • Do not worry about attaching files, github will take tar.gz snapshots from the repository for you. GitHub releases have artifacts added to them in two formats: ZIP (.zip) and GZipped Tarball (.tar.gz). The artifacts are named according to the tagname, suffixed by the format of the artifact.

  • Record the link to this new release. For example: https://github.com/filesender/filesender/releases/tag/filesender-3.0

  • Edit the files containing version numbers and changelogs. Particularly the docs directory shows how to get the latest release from git and might need to have small changes. Commit this to master on github (through a PR).

  • You might need to edit the Development Status section on the home page to reflect the current release number and release date.

  • Send the release announcement email as plain text (NO HTML!) using the following email template:
To: filesender-announce@filesender.org
Cc: filesender-dev@filesender.org
Subject: New FileSender Released: version N.nn 

Hi,

A new FileSender release is now available for download.
Please see the releases page for full details and information
on how to obtain, install, and migrate to this release

https://github.com/filesender/filesender/releases/

Cheers.