Release nodes

Creating a release node for your project

1. Navigate to your project's page; for example, http://drupal.org/project/signup.
2. Under the Releases heading, click Add new release as shown below. Note that you will only see this link if you are on the list of people with CVS access to the project.

   

3. Select the CVS identifier you want to use from the list of available branches and tags that aren't yet associated with a release.
4. If you chose to create a release from HEAD, you'll see an intermediary page which prompts you to indicate the Drupal version that this release series is compatible with.

5. Finally, fill in the remaining details of your release, such as a Description and click Submit. Note that there are certain fields on this form that are calculated automatically and cannot be changed.

   Here you may also specify a Release type for your release. This indicates to others whether the release contains bug fixes, new features, or a security update (or some combination). This is very useful, as it helps people to evaluate whether or not they need to change to a particular release, and whether or not updating to a release is critical for security reasons. You can also go back and edit old releases to provide this information. See Types of releases for more detailed information.

   To help generate detailed and accurate release notes, you can use the cvs-release-notes.php script (which lives in the /contributions/tricks/cvs-release-notes directory of the contributions repository). You just checkout a local copy of your project, and in the root directory of your project's source code, you run the script and provide the name of the CVS tag for the previous release and the current release. It will parse all the CVS log messages between the 2 releases, and print out an HTML version of all unique commit messages, sorted chronologically, with any references to #xxxxx replaced with a link to that issue number. You will need to further edit this list for clarity, remove entries that aren't relevant for end users of your project to know about, and so on, but it should help get you started.

6. You will receive a message to inform you that your release has been submitted. The new release will initially be unpublished; only after the packaging scripts run will it become published, at which time users will be able to download a tarball of your module, theme, or translation. The packaging scripts run every 5 minutes for official releases from release tags. Development snapshots (from the ends of CVS branches) are only packaged every 12 hours.

Things to watch

• During the deployment of the release system on drupal.org, release nodes were automatically generated for all of the existing branches in the contributions repository that were being packaged (e.g. the old 4.7.0 versions of modules from the DRUPAL-4-7 branch, or the cvs versions of modules from HEAD). If your contribution existed as of 2006-11-11, you do not need to make release nodes for the snapshot releases from these branches, and you will not see them listed as available CVS identifiers when trying to add new release nodes.
• You will only be able to create releases for projects if you are on the list of people with "CVS access" to that project.
• Once a release has been added, you will not be able to delete the release, or to remove the corresponding CVS tag. If you don't like what's in the release, your only recourse is to make another, newer one.
• If you found a bug that needs to be fixed in several releases of your project, make sure to commit the fix to the different branches unless you are no longer maintaining certain releases of your project.
• You may only create releases for modules, themes, theme engines, and translations. Personal sandboxes, items in the documentation directory of the contributions repository, etc. won't be packaged.