Releasing a new version of Mitiq#

Note

These instructions are for Mitiq maintainers. Releasing a new version of Mitiq is typically performed by the milestone manager whose responsibilities are detailed here.

When the time is ready for a new release, follow the checklist and instructions of this document to go through all the steps below:

Prepare the master branch #

The start of any release is drafting the changelog and bumping the version number. Ensure the commit where these changes are made include authorship for all contributors for the given milestone (code, or not). (Co-authored commits can be created by following the documentation here.)

Update the changelog #

This task has two parts:

Make sure that CHANGELOG.md has an entry for each pull request (PR) since the last release. This can be generated from the commit history using git log vX.Y.Z.. --pretty=format:"- %s [%an]" where vX.Y.Z is the last version of mitiq which was released. The author names need to then be replaced with the author’s GitHub handle. An example might look like - Update python-rapidjson requirement from <=1.6 to <1.8 (#1389) [@dependabot[bot]] once completed.
The release author should add a “Summary” section with a couple sentences describing the latest release, and then update the title of the release section to include the release date and remove the “In Development” designation.

Bump version in VERSION.txt #

When releasing a new version, one must update the VERSION.txt file which is the single source of truth for version information. We follow SemVer, so typically a release will involve changing the version from vX.Y.Zdev (development) to vX.Y.Z (released).

Do the release #

Create a new tag #

Once the above changes (new changelog and new version) are merged into the master branch, checkout and pull the latest on the master branch from your local machine. Then once you are up to date, tag the most recent commit on master (using git tag) with a tag that matches the number VERSION.txt (with a preceding “v”, so 0.1.0 is v0.1.0) and push this tag to the Github repository.

git tag v0.1.0
git push origin v0.1.0

Release the new version on Github #

Note

You need to have write access to the Mitiq Github repository to make a new release.

There should be a new draft release on GitHub created by the gh-release action, triggered by the tag you made in the previous step here. You will need to review it and publish the release.

GitHub will create compressed files with the repository.
GitHub adds the full changelog in the draft release. Please keep the content related to the new release and remove the content related to previous releases.

Note

If all the above steps have been successfully completed, ReadTheDocs (RTD) will automatically build new latest and stable versions of the documentation. So, no additional steps are needed for updating RTD. You can verify changes have been updating by viewing https://mitiq.readthedocs.io/. Note that this may require a significant amount of time. You can check the build status here

Release the new version on PyPI #

Once the GitHub release is published, the release is also published on PyPI by the publish-pypi action. This may require a few minutes. If it seems like it didn’t push a new version to PyPI, you can trigger it manually. Go to unitaryfund/mitiq and use the “Run Workflow” button to publish the new version on PyPI.

In case the action for releasing on PyPI fails, the Python commands to release Mitiq are:

python -m pip install --upgrade pip
make install requirements
pip install setuptools wheel twine
python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel
twine upload dist/*

Note

You need to be a registered maintainer of Mitiq project on PyPI to upload a new release on PyPI from your local machine.

Update the new development version #

Add a new section to the CHANGELOG.md to track changes in the following release, meaning that if vX.Y.Z was just released, then there should be a section for vX.(Y+1).0 that is marked “In Development”. Finally, change the version in VERSION.txt from vX.Y.Z to vX.(Y+1).0dev.